After a considerable interval, during which Nick held the girl tightly
and silently in his arms, he released her, sat with his head resting
on his cupped palms in an attitude of deep study. Pat, beside him,
fell mechanically to repinning the throat of her frock, which had
opened during the moments of the embrace. He rose to his feet, pacing
nervously before her.
"It isn't a thing to do on the impulse of a moment, Pat," he muttered,
pausing at her side. "You must see that."
"It isn't the impulse of a moment."
"But one doesn't abandon everything, the whole world, so easily,
Honey. One doesn't cast away a last hope, however forlorn a hope it may
be!"
"Is there a hope, Nick?" she asked gently. "Is there a chance left to
us?"
"I don't know!" His voice held an increasing tenseness. "Before
God--I--don't know!"
"If there's a chance, the very slightest shadow of the specter of a
chance, we'll take it, won't we? Because the other way is always open
to us, Nick."
"Yes. It's always open."
"But we won't take that chance," she continued defiantly, "if it
involves my losing you, Honey. I meant what I said, Nick: I don't want
to live without you!"
"What chance have we?" he queried somberly. "Those are our
alternatives--life apart, death together."
"Then you know my choice!" she cried desperately. "Nick, Honey--don't
let's draw it out in futile talking! I can't stand it!"
He moved his hand in a gesture of bewilderment and frustration, and
turned away, striding nervously toward the window whose blind she had
raised. He leaned his hands on the table, peering dejectedly out upon
the street below.
"What time," he asked irrelevantly in a queer voice, "did the Doctor
say the moon rose? Do you remember?"
"No," she said tensely. "Oh, Honey! Please--don't stand there with your
back to me now, when I'm half crazy!"
"I'm thinking," he responded. "It rises a little earlier each night--or
is it later? No matter; come here, Pat."
She rose wearily and joined him; he slipped his arm about her, and drew
her against him.
"Look there," he said, indicating the night-dark vista beyond the
window.
She looked out upon a dim-lit street or court, at the blind end of
which the house was apparently situated. Far off at the open end,
across a distant highway where even at this hour passed a constant
stream of traffic, flashed a narrow strip of lake; and above it, rising
gigantic from the coruscating moon-path, lifted the satellite. She
watched the remote flickering of the waves as they tossed back the
broken bits of the light strewn along the path. Then she turned puzzled
eyes on her companion.
"That's Heaven," he said pointing a finger at the great flowing lunar
disk. "There's a world that never caught the planet-cancer called Life,
or if it ever suffered, it's cured. It's clean--burned clean by the
sun and scoured clean by the airless zero of space. A dead world, and
therefore not an unhappy one."
The girl stared at him without comprehension. She murmured, "I don't
understand, Nick."
"Don't you, Pat?" He pointed again at the moon. "That's Heaven, the
dead world, and this is Hell, the living one. Heaven and Hell swinging
forever about their common center!" He gestured toward the sparkling
moon-path on the water. "Look, Pat! The dead world strews flowers on
the grave of the living one!"
Some of his bitter ecstasy caught the girl; she felt his somber mood of
exaltation.
"I love you, Nick!" she whispered, pressing closely to him.
"What difference does it make--our actions?" he queried. "There's the
omen, that lifeless globe in the sky. Where we go, all humanity now
living will follow before a century, and in a million years, the human
race as well! What if we go a year or a million years before the rest?
Will it make any difference in the end?" He looked down at her. "All
we've been valuing here is hope. To the devil with hope! Let's have
peace instead!"
"I'm not afraid, Nick."
"Nor I. And if we go, _he_ goes, and he's mortally afraid of death!"
"Can he--prevent you?"
"Not now! I'm the stronger now. For this time, I'm master."
He turned again to stare at the glowing satellite as it rose
imperceptibly from the horizon. "There's nothing to regret," he
murmured, "except one thing--the loss of beauty. Beauty like that--and
like you, Pat. That's bitterly hard to foreswear!" He leaned forward
toward the remote disk of the moon; he spoke as if addressing it, in
tones so low that the girl, pressed close to him, had to quiet the
sound of her own breath to listen. He said:
"Long miles above cloud-bank and blast,
And many miles above the sea,
I watch you rise majestically
Feeling your chilly light at last--
Cold beauty in the way you cast
Split silver fragments on the waves,
As if this planet's life were past,
And all men peaceful in their graves."
Pat was silent for a moment as he paused, then she murmured a low
phrase. "Oh, I love you, Nick!" she said.
"And I you, dear," he responded. "Have we decided anything? Are
we--going through with it?"
"I've not faltered," she said soberly. "I meant it, Nick. Without you,
life would be as empty as that airless void you speak of. I'm not
afraid. What's there to be afraid of?"
"Only the transition, Pat. That and the unknown--but no situation could
possibly be more terrible than our present one. It _couldn't_ be!
Oblivion, annihilation--they're preferable, aren't they?"
"Oh, yes! Nothing I can imagine could be other than a change for the
better."
"Then let's face it!" His voice took on a note of determination. "I've
thought to face it a dozen times before this, and each time I've
hesitated. The hesitation of a coward, Pat."
"You're no coward, dear. It was that illusion of hope; that always
weakens one. No one's strong who hasn't given up hope."
"Then," he repeated, "let's face it!"
"How, Nick?"
"My father has left us the means. There in the cabinet are a hundred
deaths--swift ones, lingering ones, painful, and easy! I don't know one
from the other; our choice must be blind." He strode over to the case,
sending slivers of glass from the shattered front glistening along
the floor. "I'd choose an easy one, Dear, if I knew, for your sake.
Euthanasia!"
He stared hesitantly at the files of mysterious drugs with their
incomprehensible labels.
Suddenly the scene appeared humorous to the girl, queerly funny, in
some unnatural horrible fashion. Her nerves, overstrained for hours,
were on the verge of breaking; without realization of it, she had come
to the border of hysteria.
"Shopping for death!" she choked, trying to suppress the wild laughter
that beat in her throat. "Which one's most suitable? Which one's most
becoming? Which one"--an hysterical laughing sob shook her--"will wear
the longest?"
He turned, gazing at her with an illogical concern in his face.
"What's the difference?" she cried wildly. "I don't care--painful or
pleasant, it all ends in the same grave! Close your eyes and choose!"
Suddenly he was holding her in his arms again, and she was sobbing,
clinging to him frantically. She was miserably unstrung; her body
shook under the impact of her gasping breath. Then gradually, she
quieted, and was silent against him.
"We've been mad!" he murmured. "It's been an insane idea--for me to
inflict this on you, Pat. Do you think I could consider the destruction
of your beauty, Dear? I've been lying to myself, stifling my judgment
with poetic imagery, when all the while it was just that I'm afraid to
face the thing alone!"
"No," she murmured, burying her face against his shoulder. "I'm the
coward, Nick. I'm the one that's frightened, and I'm the one that broke
down! It's just been--too much, this evening; I'm all right now."
"But we'll not go through with _this_, Pat!"
"But we will! It's better than life without you, Dear. We've argued and
argued, and at last forgotten the one truth, the one thing I'll never
retract: I can't face living without you, Nick! I can't!"
He brushed his hand wearily before his eyes. "Back at the starting
point," he muttered. "All right, Honey. So be it!"
He strode again to the cabinet. "Corrosive sublimate," he murmured.
"Cyanide of Potassium. They're both deadly, but I think the second is
rapid, and therefore less painful. Cyanide let it be!"
He extracted two small beakers from the glassware on the shelf. He
filled them with water from a carafe on the table, and, while the girl
watched him with fascinated eyes, he deliberately tilted a spoonful or
so of white crystals into each of them. The mixture swirled a moment,
then settled clear and colorless, and the crystals began to shrink as
they passed swiftly into solution.
"There it is," he announced grimly. "There's peace, oblivion,
forgetfulness, and annihilation for you, for me, and--for _him_! Beyond
all doubt, the logical course for us, isn't it? Do we take it?"
"Please," she said faintly. "Kiss me first, Honey. Isn't that the
proper course for lovers in this situation?" She felt a faint touch of
astonishment at her own irony; the circumstances had ceased to have
any reality to her, and had become merely a dramatic sequence like the
happenings in a play.
He gathered her again into his arms and pressed his lips to hers. It
was a long, tender, wistful kiss; when at last it ended, Pat found her
eyes again filled with tears, but not this time the tears of hysteria.
"Nick!" she murmured. "Nick, darling!"
He gave her a deep, somber, but very tender smile, and reached for one
of the deadly beakers, "To another meeting!" he said as his fingers
closed on it.
Suddenly, amazingly, the strident ring of a doorbell sounded, the more
surprising since they had all but forgotten the existence of a world
about them. Interruption! It meant only the going through once more of
all that they had just passed.
"Drink it!" exclaimed Pat impulsively, seizing the remaining beaker.
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