funny. Coughing,” says the other man.
I pronounce exactly. “Maybe a little cold coming on.”
“Check with the doc later.”
I nod my head and it is good to nod. It is good to do several things after ten thousand years. It is good to breathe the air and it is good to feel the sun in the flesh deep and going deeper and it is good to feel the structure of ivory, the fine skeleton hidden in the warming flesh, and it is good to hear sounds much clearer and more immediate than they were in the stone deepness of a well. I sit enchanted.
“Come out of it, Jones. Snap to it. We got to move!”
“Yes,” I say, hypnotized with the way the word forms like water on the tongue and falls with slow beauty out into the air.
I walk and it is good walking. I stand high and it is a long way to the ground when I look down from my eyes and my head. It is like living on a fine cliff and being happy there.
Regent stands by the stone well, looking down. The others have gone murmuring to the silver ship from which they came.
I feel the fingers of my hand and the smile of my mouth.
“It is deep,” I say.
“Yes.”
“It is called a Soul Well.”
Regent raises his head and looks at me. “How do you know that?”
“Doesn’t it look like one?”
“I never heard of a Soul Well.”
“A place where waiting things, things that once had flesh, wait and wait,” I say, touching his arm.
The sand is fire and the ship is silver fire in the hotness of the day and the heat is good to feel. The sound of my feet in the hard sand. I listen. The sound of the wind and the sun burning the valleys. I smell the smell of the rocket boiling in the noon. I stand below the port.
“Where’s Regent?” someone says.
“I saw him by the well,” I reply.
One of them runs toward the well. I am beginning to tremble. A fine shivering tremble, hidden deep, but becoming very strong. And for the first time I hear it, as if it too were hidden in a well. A voice calling deep within me, tiny and afraid. And the voice cries, Let me go, let me go, and there is a feeling as if something is trying to get free, a pounding of labyrinthine doors, a rushing down dark corridors and up passages, echoing and screaming.
“Regent’s in the well!”
The men are running, all five of them. I run with them but now I am sick and the trembling is violent.
“He must have fallen. Jones, you were here with him. Did you see? Jones? Well, speak up, man.”
“What’s wrong, Jones?”
I fall to my knees, the trembling is so bad.
“He’s sick. Here, help me with him.”
“The sun.”
“No, not the sun,” I murmur.
They stretch me out and the seizures come and go like earthquakes and the deep hidden voice in me cries, This is Jones, this is me, that’s not him, that’s not him, don’t believe him, let me out, let me out! And I look up at the bent figures and my eyelids flicker. They touch my wrists.
“His heart is acting up.”
I close my eyes. The screaming stops. The shivering ceases.
I rise, as in a cool well, released.
“He’s dead,” says someone.
“Jones is dead.”
“From what?”
“Shock, it looks like.”
“What kind of shock?” I say, and my name is Sessions and my lips move crisply, and I am the captain of these men. I stand among them and I am looking down at a body which lies cooling on the sands. I clap both hands to my head.
“Captain!”
“It’s nothing,” I say, crying out. “Just a headache. I’ll be all right. There. There,” I whisper. “It’s all right now.”
“We’d better get out of the sun, sir.”
“Yes,” I say, looking down at Jones. “We should never have come. Mars doesn’t want us.”
We carry the body back to the rocket with us, and a new voice is calling deep in me to be let out.
Help, help. Far down in the moist earthen-works of the body. Help, help! in red fathoms, echoing and pleading.
The trembling starts much sooner this time. The control is less steady.
“Captain, you’d better get in out of the sun, you don’t look too well, sir.”
“Yes,” I say. “Help,” I say.
“What, sir?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said ‘Help,’ sir.”
“Did I, Matthews, did I?”
The body is laid out in the shadow of the rocket and the voice screams in the deep underwater catacombs of bone and crimson tide. My hands jerk. My mouth splits and is parched. My nostrils fasten wide. My eyes roll. Help, help, oh help, don’t, don’t, let me out, don’t, don’t.
“Don’t,” I say.
“What, sir?”
“Never mind,” I say. “I’ve got to get free,” I say. I clap my hand to my mouth.
“How’s that, sir?” cries Matthews.
“Get inside, all of you, go back to Earth!” I shout.
A gun is in my hand. I lift it.
“Don’t, sir!”
An explosion. Shadows run. The screaming is cut off. There is a whistling sound of falling through space.
After ten thousand years, how good to die. How good to feel the sudden coolness, the relaxation. How good to be like a hand within a glove that stretches out and grows wonderfully cold in the hot sand. Oh, the quiet and the loveliness of gathering, darkening death. But one cannot linger on.
A crack, a snap.
“Good God, he’s killed himself!” I cry, and open my eyes and there is the captain lying against the rocket, his skull split by a bullet, his eyes wide, his tongue protruding between his white teeth. Blood runs from his head. I bend
