She shook her head without changing expression.
He looked at her and shrugged and thought that after a while she would
get tired and go away. He ordered, and the bartender brought a bottle
and one glass.
Hertha continued to stare at him; he tried to ignore her.
He drank. He thought it would get easier to ignore her as the level of
the bottle fell. It didn't. He drank some more. It grew late.
"I gotta explain," he said, the liquor swirling in his mind.
She waited, cow-eyed.
"Ernest Dowson. Man's name. He wrote a poem--_Beata Solitudo_. I wanna
explain this. Man lived long, long, long, long time ago. You listenin'?
Okay. That's good. That's fine. He said--it's ver' importan' you should
unnerstan' this--he said how you put honor and labor out of your mind
when you ... you're out here. What he meant, it's ... it's ... you
see.... Now I gotta make you see all this. So you listen real close
while I tell it to you. There was a man named...."
He wanted to explain how the frontier does things to people. He wanted
to explain how society is a tight little box that keeps everything
locked up and hidden, but how society breaks down and becomes fluid
in the stars, and how people explode and forget what they learned in
civilization, and how everything is unstable.
"This man, his name's--" he said.
He wanted to explain how the harsh elements and brute nature and space,
the God-awful emptiness and indifference and the sense of aloneness and
selfishness and....
There were a thousand things he wanted to tell her. They were all the
things he had thought about as he followed the frontier. If he could
get it all down right, he could make her see why he had to follow the
frontier as long as there was anything left inside of him.
Maybe the rest of the people out here were that way, too. Maybe he had
seen it in Doris' eyes tonight. Maybe that was why society broke down
in the stars and civilization came only when men and women like him
were gone.
He did not want to know how the rest felt. He did not know whether it
would be more terrifying to learn that he was alone, or that he was not
alone.
But just for tonight, he could tell the alien creature beside him. It
would be safe to tell her--if the idea had not rusted inside of him so
long that there were no longer any words to fit it.
But first he had to make her see his home planet and the great cities
and the landscaped valleys and the majestic mountains and the people.
He had to make her see the vast sweep of the explorers who first
carried the race to a million planets, who devised faster-than-light
ships and metals to make the ships out of, metals to hold their forms
in the crucible beyond normal space. He had to make her see the
colonists who tied all the world together with spans of steel commerce
and then moved on in ever-widening circles. He wanted to give her the
whole picture.
Then he wanted to explain the surge, the restlessness of the men at the
frontier. Different men, he thought; from the womb of civilization,
but unlike their brothers. The men who pushed out and out. Searching,
always searching. He was afraid to find out if their reasons were the
same as his. For himself, he had seen a thousand planets and a thousand
new life-forms. But it was not enough. There were the vast, blank,
empty, indifferent reaches of space beyond him, and that was what drove
him on.
This he wanted to say to Hertha: No matter how far you go, the thing
that gets you is that there's nothing that cares; no matter how far,
the thing is that nothing cares; the thing is that nothing cares. It
gets you. And you have to go on because some day, somewhere, there may
be--something.
But he lost the trend of his thoughts completely, and he had another
drink.
"Decent people come out here...."
What was he going to say about decent people?
"Stupid!" he cried, slapping her in the face.