The Circle of Zero, Stanley Grauman Weinbaum [books to read this summer TXT] 📗

out of the room. And when, two hours later, while Yvonne and I talked, he finished writing a certain letter and then shot himself through the heart—why, that proved nothing either.

It was the following day that Yvonne and I, his only mourners, followed old Dawn of Nothingness to his suicide’s grave. I stood beside her and tried as best I could to console her, and roused myself from a dark reverie to hear her words.

‘It was yesterday, Jack—just yesterday—that he said to me, “Next winter you shall spend in New Orleans, Yvonne”. Just yesterday!’

I watched the tear that rolled slowly down her right cheek hung glistening there a moment, then was joined by another to splash on the black bosom of her dress.

But it was later, during the evening, that the most ironic revelation of all occurred. I was gloomily blaming myself for the weakness of indulging old de Neant in the mad experiment that had led, in a way, to his death.

It was as if Yvonne read my thoughts, for she said suddenly:

‘He was breaking, Jack. His mind was going. I heard all those strange things he kept murmuring to you.’

‘What?’

‘I listened, of course, behind the door there. I never left him alone. I heard him whisper the queerest things—faces in a red fog, words about a cold grey desert, the name Pyronive, the word Termopolis. He leaned over you as you sat with closed eyes and he whispered, whispered all the time.’

Irony of ironies! It was old de Neant’s mad mind that had suggested the visions! He had described them to me as I sat in the sleep of lethargy!

Later we found the letter he had written and again I was deeply moved. The old man had carried a little insurance. Just a week before he had borrowed on one of the policies to pay the premiums on it and the others. But the letter—well, he had made me beneficiary of half the amount! And the instructions were—

‘You, Jack Anders, will take both your money and Yvonne’s and carry out the plan as you know I wish.’

Lunacy! De Neant had found the way to provide the money but—I couldn’t gamble Yvonne’s last dollar on the scheme of a disordered mind.

‘What will we do?’ I asked her. ‘Of course the money’s all yours. I won’t touch it.’

‘Mine?’ she echoed. ‘Why, no. We’ll do as he wished. Do you think I’d not respect his last request?’

Well, we did. I took those miserable few thousands and spread them around in that sick December market. You remember what happened, how during the spring the prices skyrocketed as if they were heading back toward 1929, when actually the depression was just gathering breath.

I rode that market like a circus performer. I took profits and pyramided them back and, on April 27th, with our money multiplied fifty times, I sold out and watched the market slide back.

Coincidence? Very likely. After all, Aurore de Neant’s mind was clear enough most of the time. Other economists predicted that spring rise. Perhaps he foresaw it too. Perhaps he staged this whole affair just to trick us into the gamble, one which we’d never have dared risk otherwise. And then when he saw we were going to fail from lack of money he took the only means he had of providing it.

Perhaps. That’s the rational explanation, and yet—that vision of ruined Termopolis keeps haunting me. I see again the grey cold desert of the floating fungi. I wonder often about the immutable Law of Chance and about a ghostly Jack Anders somewhere beyond eternity.

For perhaps he does—did—will exist. Otherwise, how to explain that final vision? What of Yvonne’s words beside her father’s grave? Could he have foreseen those words and whispered them to me? Possibly. But what, then, of those two tears that hung glistening, merged and dropped from her cheeks?

What of them?

THE END