Well, I hadn't read a Sherlock Holmes story in, what, thirty years at least. But come to think of it, 221b Baker Street might not be a bad address for the afterlife.
"You'll have to forgive me, Holmes," I managed. "Of course Her Majesty must be beside herself with anxiety for the welfare of her pet. Have the abductors of the royal canine announced their terms for Rollo's return?"
"Indeed they have, Sloat, indeed they have!" Holmes crossed the room in two lengthy strides and thrust into my hands a piece of cheap foolscap on which a message had been placed in the form of words cut from newspapers and crudely attached with mucilage.
Even as I reached to take the paper from Holmes I felt myself slipping away, lifted out of that world to the accompaniment of four notes sounded on an Arab flute, four notes repeated over and over yet never quite repeating exactly the same pattern of sound.
Little Pointy grinned, or he would have grinned, I'm sure, if he'd had a face. Somehow in my mind he was grinning. "Ain't this fun?"
"Is that Heaven?" I asked him. "Playing Watson to an imaginary Sherlock Holmes?"
"Is there any other kind of Sherlock Holmes? You're not one of those poor souls who write letters to Baker Street asking Holmes to help find their lost brooches or make their husbands love them again, are you?"
"Don't be ridiculous. I can tell the difference between what's real and what's imaginary."
"Can you? Actually, can you? Am I real? Are you?
Cogito, ergo sum?
Poor old Monsieur Descartes. I can arrange for you to meet him, if you'd like, Webster old boy."
I shook my head, or thought I shook my head. Once you start down that street the only end is a room with soft walls and rounded corners. Instead, I said, "I guess anybody can have an idea of Heaven."
Pointy grinned again, or would have if . . . oh, you know the drill. Okay. Pointy grinned again. "You ever hear the story of the fundamentalist missionary and the Eskimo family? The more he ranted about hellfire and toasting forever on the devil's own griddle, the more his host kept saying, 'Yes, yes, that's where I want to spend eternity!'"
I managed to stand up and walk around a little. My hindquarters were getting numb from all the sitting, and I'd been reading about the dangers of too much sitting, embolisms and all that. I said, "You know what I'd like to do in the afterlife—assuming, that is, that there is such a thing?"
Pointy said, "No, Webster, I don't know. Suppose you tell me."
I said, "Nope!" I was going to show that I was smarter than a glittering point of light that probably wouldn't even be there if I took off my special glasses.
And fuck you very much, Ed Guenther.
"I'll just sit back and have another sip of my brandy. Would you like—oh, I'm sorry, I guess that wouldn't be possible would it? Anyway, I tell you what. I'm getting a little bit weary. Suppose you hit me with your best shot and then we'll call it a night."
Pointy said, "Fair enough, Webster old boy. Let's see. We have the Muslim paradise. Days of wine and virgins appeal to you? How about the Christians? We've been over that already, haven't we? Still, though—fluffy clouds, golden harps, people wandering around like hippies in robes and sandals? No sale?"
I swear, if that point of light had been a salesman in an automobile showroom he would have been coming at me with the classic line about, "What would it take to put you into a shiny new Charioteer V-8 with air, MP3, GPS, and . . ." But of course this wasn't an auto showroom and he wasn't a car salesman so he said, "What would you like to try?"
I said, "Tell you what, I'll roll the dice if you will."
There was a moment of silence. Then Pointy said, "Roll the dice? Me, roll the dice? No hands little me?"
I just sat there.
Pointy sighed. I think he actually sighed. "Tough audience," he grumbled. Then, "Okay, let's give 'er a whirl and see that happens."
I could almost hear the late great Lawrence Welk signaling his band of merry pranksters. Anna Won, Anna Too . . .
Horns, donkeys, Arab street vendors, the distant cry of the muezzin, a wooden flute, and—
I was standing on the flight deck of a little spaceship and from the sights I could see beyond the view-ports we were way, way out in space. I mean, not just far from Earth or even from Sol. Not even outside our galaxy. I mean, we were way, way into deep space—and beyond it.
I used to sit in on some blue-sky sessions at the lab. Ed Guenther liked to get the superbrains together after hours, sometimes in his office, sometimes in the cafeteria, most often at Albert and Paddy's Bar and Grille in Fremont. The establishment was run by a fellow named Harry Slotnick. Nobody had ever seen Albert or Paddy, but Slotnick insisted that he was just a hired hand, the place had been founded back in the 1950s by Albert Einstein and Patrick Houlihan.
Harry Slotnick used to hand out tee shirts to his regular clientele with a picture of Albert Einstein and Patrick Houlihan toasting each other in Irish whiskey. You couldn't buy one of those shirts for any price. Just keep showing up at the A&P and after a while, if Harry took to you, he'd give you the shirt.
There was even an A&P baseball cap, or at least legend had it so. I've never seen one.
Anyway, one wet Friday after the lab had closed, Ed Guenther and Miranda Nguyen from Silicon Research, Alberto Salazar from NASA-Ames, Bobby Armstrong from NIMH, and I had settled in for a happy session of generously lubricated speculation. Topic
du nuit
was, What happens if you get to the very edge of Einsteinian space-time and keep on going?
Conservative view was, you'd just swoop around and head back in, whatever "in" meant in that context. In other words, once you reached the end of space, you'd discover that there was no more there, there.
Shades of Gertie Stein!
But Miranda Nguyen said she wasn't convinced of that. She thought you could pop right out of our cozy little four-dimensional space-time continuum and travel through a
fifth
dimension where ordinary four-dimensional universes floated around like air bubbles in a fresh stein of beer and pop back into a four-dimensional universe, our own or another, pay your money and take your pick.
Then Bobby Armstrong, our resident headshrinker on loan from the Feds, rapped for attention. "I read this story once," Bobby started.
Everybody moaned.
Bobby is a science fiction nut. Not only that, he's an
old
science fiction nut. Any time anybody claims ownership of a new and startling idea, Bobby comes back with, "I read this story once," and he'll give with a full citation, volume and issue number, of some story that was published in a pulp magazine before any of us were even born, that had exactly that idea in it.
Now Bobby said, "This story, it was called 'The Living Galaxy,' by Laurence Manning,
Wonder Stories,
September 1934. This space ship gets outside our galaxy—nobody knew there was more than one, back in 'thirty-four—and the astronauts look back and they see tentacles and pseudopods and they realize that our whole galaxy is a living creature and we're just a tiny speck, less than a cell, inside this creature. And of course if there's one of these beings wriggling around in hyperspace then there have to be more of them. Then the great Ray Bradbury came along with a story called 'King of the Gray Spaces' in 1943 . . ."
Ed Guenther said, "Enough already, Bobby, for God's sake, we'll take your word for it."
Okay, okay, I don't want to turn this into just another one of those tiresome conversations-in-a-tavern ditties like Clarke's White Hart stories or Robinson's Crosstime Saloon or that one I once read called "At the Esquire." Point is, in my dream or hallucination or whatever you want to call it that Little Pointy had dragged me into, there I was on the flight deck of a little spaceship called
The Comet.
There was a crew of five but only two of us were human. I was the captain and pilot and my co-pilot and faithful friend and companion was a gorgeous raven-haired beauty named Joan Randall who could have passed for 1940s glamour queen Ann Sheridan's twin sister.
Then there was a seven-foot-tall robot named Grag and a rubbery hairless android named Otho and a human brain in a transparent cube filled with nutrient fluid. The brain had once belonged to the brilliant Simon Wright. Simon could see with photo-electric eyes and speak through a circular diaphragm.
We'd been pursuing the mad would-be universal dictator Zohak-Yei. He'd been reported on a thousand worlds in a hundred galaxies but at last we'd tracked him down to an asteroid that he'd taken over in one of the spiral arms of the Andromeda Galaxy. He was reportedly building a machine that would send out antigravity waves throughout the universe, disrupting the mental and physical processes that had kept galactic peace for ten thousand years.
Once chaos reigned the Legion of Zohak-Yei would descend on the settled worlds, forcing every civilized race to submit to Zohak-Yei's cruel dictatorship—or perish in an orgy of madness and destruction!
Planets and stars flashed by our tiny ship like snowflakes in a winter storm in the Sierras as we drove on toward Zohak-Yei's distant lair. Our cyclotrons whined at an ear-splitting screech as we drove them to the danger point and beyond. The universe outside the windows of our tiny ship flashed and tumbled as if the very gods were protesting our audacity.
The cyclotrons' scream modulated into a weird musical note. Then another and another and—
I was sitting in front of the TV set. The screen was filled with countless whirling colors. A single brilliant point of light hovered in front of me, circling like an insect seeking a place to settle.
"That was a good one," Pointy commented.
I said, "Can you see everything I—what should I call these experiences? Dreams?"
"I don't think so. Visions, maybe. Your language is kind of thin when it comes to describing, ah . . ."
"Right." I think I actually smiled. "The indescribable."
"Anyway, you seem to have gone from versions of the afterlife that your various pulpit-thumpers like to rant about, to a lot more personal idea. But I guess it's true, isn't it?"
"Isn't what?"
"That everybody makes his own heaven or hell."
"I guess."
"You're looking kind of peaked, Webster." Pointy bobbed up and down a couple of times. If he'd been human I think he would have been nodding. "Want to call it a night?"
I lifted my hand to look at my faithful old Timex. The Oyster that Martha gave me for my birthday I keep in its box and take out for special occasions. I couldn't read the darned thing. Either the hands were whirling around faster than I could see, or they were standing still at quarter to yesterday or half-past tomorrow.
"In a strange way," I told Pointy, "I'm actually having fun. Let's keep 'em rolling. One or two more, anyhow."
Pointy said, "Okay, Web. It's your funeral." He stood there, pulsing away. "It's your funeral," he reiterated. "Get it? Afterlife. Funeral? Oh, never mind. Talk about trying to work a dead house." Pause. "Dead house—get it? Work a dead house? Man, are you ever stiff!"
I remember when my little ray of sunshine used to come home from first grade and share knock-knock jokes with me. I never understood them but she did for sure and she'd explode in hysterical laughter that was so joyous I'd find myself close to tears with amusement and joy just to be with her.
So don't tell me about laughter, Pointy. I know what laughter is all about.
We were down 14-13 with five seconds on the clock. The Scorpions had the ball on our two-yard line. If our kicker hadn't missed a conversion the score would have been tied but as it was, barring a miracle, we didn't have a chance.
Somehow it was the era of leather helmets and sixty-minute men and water-boys rushing onto the field during time-outs with buckets of water and ladles to keep the players from passing out. Rovers Stadium was packed for the big game. Must have been three thousand people there. Cheerleaders jumping up and down in their sweaters and pleated skirts and bobby sox and saddle shoes, shaking their pompoms and yelling for all they were worth.
The Scorps could have had the victory for the taking, just snap the ball and run around for five seconds and the game would be over but their quarterback was a nasty character. He wanted to rub it in. He figured they could push in for one more touchdown on the last play of the game, rack up an extra six-pointer just to rub our noses in it.
Their center snapped the ball and both of their ends circled around into our backfield in a crossing pattern. The quarterback sent up a soft spiral into the end zone. Their two halfbacks converged. I was the lone defender right there. I didn't know which of the two receivers to cover so instead I ignored them and leaped as high as I could, just as the ball dropped toward the turf and into my hands.
I ran straight ahead, jumped over the writhing pile of linemen and into the Scorpions' backfield. I think they must have been shocked by the sudden reversal of fortune. Five or six Scorpion players headed for me but even before they could get their bearings I had put the better part of ten yards between them and me. I was running as fast as I could, desperately working to drag air into my lungs as I pounded up the middle of the field toward the distant goal posts.
Somehow I heard the cannon go off marking the end of playing time but I kept on running. If I stepped out of bounds the game was over. If I was tackled the game was over. There was nothing I could do except keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. I heard four notes sounding over and over, over and over with each step I took.
There was one figure between me and the goal line. Through streaming, stinging sweat I recognized the Scorpions' quarterback. When everyone else on their team had run toward me, the quarterback had run toward their own goal line. He was standing on the goal line now, jumping up and down, shouting something at me. I couldn't hear him but I could read his lips. "Come on, you yellow-belly," he screamed, "come on, I'll smash you to bits!"