A Case of Conscience

The invitation to Egtverchi's coming-out party had almost succeeded in piercing the iron fog which had descended between Agronski and the rest of creation. He had nad the notion that the sight of a live Lithian might do something for him, though what he could hardly have said; and besides, he had wanted to see Mike and the Father again, moved by memories of having been fond of them once. But the Father was not there, Mike had been removed light-years away from him by having taken up in the meantime with a woman — and of all the meaningless obsessions of mankind, Agronski was most determined now to avoid the tyranny of sex — and in person Egtverchi had turned out to be a grotesque and alarming Earthly caricature of the Lithians that Agronski remembered. Disgusted with himself, he kept sedulously away from all of them, and in the process, quite inadvertently, got drunk. He remembered no more of the party except scraps of a fight that he had had with some swarthy flunkey in a huge dark room bounded by metal webwork, like being inside the shaft of the Eiffel Tower at midnight — a memory which seemed to include inexplicable rising clouds of steam and a jerky intensification of his catholic, nauseating vertigo, as though he and his anonymous adversary were being lowered into hell on the end of a thousand-mile-long hydraulic piston.

He had awakened after noon the next day in his rooms with a thousand-fold increase in the giddiness, an awful sense of mission before a holocaust, and the worst hangover he had had since the drunk he had staged on cooking sherry in the first week of his freshman year hi college. It took him two days to get rid of the hangover, but the rest remained, shutting him off utterly even from the things that he could see and touch in his own apartment. He could not taste his food; words on paper had no meaning; he could not make his way from his chair to the toilet without wondering if at the next step the room would turn upside down or vanish entirely. Nothing had any volume, texture, or mass, let alone any color; the secondary properties of things, which had been leaking steadily out of his world ever since Lithia, were gone entirely now, and the primary qualities were beginning to follow.

The end was clear and predictable. There was to be nothing left but the little plexus of habit patterns at the center of which lived the dwindling unknowable thing that was his I. By the time one of those habits brought him before the 3-V set and snapped open the switch, it was already too late to save anything else. There was nobody left in the universe but himself — nobody and nothing -

Except that, when the screen lighted and Egtverchi failed to appear, he discovered that even the I no longer had a name. Inside the thin shell of unwilling self-consciousness, it was as empty as an upended jug.

XIV

Ruiz-Sanchez put the much-folded, sleazy airletter down into his lap and looked blindly out the compartment window of the rapido. The train was already an hour out from Naples, slightly less than halfway to Rome, and as yet he had seen almost nothing of the country he had been hoping to reach all of his adult life; and now he had a headache. Michelis' sprawling cursive handwriting was under the best of circumstances about as legible as Beethoven's, and obviously he had written this letter under the worst circumstances imaginable. And after emotion had done its considerable worst to Michelis' scrawl, the facsimile reducer had squeezed it all down onto a single piece of tissue for missile mail, so that only a man who knew the handwriting as well as Assyriologists know cuneiform could have deciphered the remaining ant tracks at all.

After a moment, he picked up where he had left off; the. letter went on:

Which is why I missed the subsequent debacle. There is still some doubt in my mind as to whether or not Egtverchi was entirely responsible — it occurs to me that maybe the countess' smokes did affect him in some way after all, since his metabolism can't be totally different from ours — but you'd know much more about that than I would. It's perfectly possible that I'm just whistling past the graveyard.

In any event, I don't know any more about the sub-130 basement shambles than the papers have reported. In case you haven't seen them, what happened was that Egtverchi and his bravoes somehow became impatient with the progress the serpentine was making, or with the caliber of the entertainment they could see from it, and went on an expedition of their own, breaking down the barriers between cells when they couldn't find any other way in. Egtverchi is still pretty weak for a Lithian, but he's big, and the dividing walls apparently didn't pose him any problems.