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light. How can such a variety of creatures coexist at all? Because they have
to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day
of the ebb tide, they know no other.
But that long day ends at last; yields to the nighttime of the flood.
And, just as the waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the
pools, so over George and the others in sleep come the waters of that other
ocean — that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains
everyone and everything, past, present and future, and extends unbroken
beyond the uttermost stars. We may surely suppose that, in the darkness of
the full flood, some of these creatures are lifted from their pools to drift far
out over the deep waters. But do they ever bring back, when the daytime of
the ebb returns, any kind of catch with them? Can they tell us, in any
manner, about their journey? Is there, indeed, anything for them to tell —
except that the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the
pool?
WITHIN this body on the bed, the great pump works on and on, needing no
rest. All over this quietly pulsating vehicle the skeleton crew make their tiny
adjustments. As for what goes on topside, they know nothing of this but
danger signals, false alarms mostly: red lights flashed from the panicky brain
stem, curtly con-tradicted by green all clears from the level-headed cortex.
But now the controls are on automatic. The cortex is drowsing; the brain
stem registers only an occasional nightmare. Everything seems set for a
routine run from here to morning. The odds are enormously against any kind
of accident. The safety record of this vehicle is outstanding.
Just let us suppose, however.
Let us take the particular instant, years ago, when George walked into
The Starboard Side and set eyes for the first time on Jim, not yet
demobilized and looking stunning beyond words in his Navy uniform. Let us
then suppose that, at that same instant, deep down in one of the major
branches of George's coronary artery, an unimaginably gradual process
began. Somehow — no doctor can tell us exactly why — the inner lining begins
to become roughened. And, one by one, on the roughened surface of the
smooth endothelium, ions of calcium, carried by the bloodstream, begin to
be deposited.... Thus, slowly, invisibly, with the utmost discretion and
without the slightest hint to those old fussers in the brain, an almost
indecently melodramatic situation is contrived: the formation of the
atheromatous plaque.
Let us suppose this, merely. (The body on the bed is still snoring.)
This thing is wildly improbable. You could bet thousands of dollars against
its happening, tonight or any night. And yet it could, quite possibly, be about
to happen — within the next five minutes.
Very well — let us suppose that this is the night, and the hour, and the
appointed minute.
Now.
The body on the bed stirs slightly, perhaps; but it does not cry out,
does not wake. It shows no outward sign of the instant, annihilating shock.
Cortex and brain stem are murdered in the blackout with the speed of an
Indian strangler. Throttled out of its oxygen, the heart clenches and stops.
The lungs go dead, their power line cut. All over the body, the arterials
contract. Had this blockage not been absolute, had the occlusion occurred in
one of the smaller branches of the artery, the skeleton crew could have dealt
with it; they are capable of engineering miracles. Given time, they could
have rigged up bypasses, channeled out new collateral communications,
sealed off the damaged area with a scar. But there is no time at all. They die
without warning at their posts.
For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the tissues of some outlying
regions of the body. Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total
blackness. And if some part of the nonentity we called George has indeed
been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep waters, then it will return to find itself homeless. For it can associate no longer with what lies here, unsnoring, on the bed. This is now cousin to the garbage in the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away
and disposed of, before too long.
The End
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