A Choice of Gods

8

He would not have known his brother, Jason told himself, if he'd met him unaware. The stature was there and the proud, hard bearing, but the face was hidden behind a dull and grizzled beard. There was something else as well—a coldness in the eyes, a tenseness in the face. Age had not mellowed John; it had tempered and toughened him and given him a sadness that had not been there before.

"John," he said and stopped just inside the doorway. "John, we have so often wondered…" and then stopped talking, staring at this stranger in the room.

"It's all right, Jason," said his brother. "Martha didn't know me, either. I have changed."

"I would have," Martha said. "Given just a little time, I would have. It's the beard."

Jason went quickly across the room, grasped his brother's outstretched hand, put an arm around his shoulders and drew him close, holding him hard. "It's good to see you," he said. "So good to have you back. It has been so long."

They stepped away from one another and stood for a moment, silent, staring at one another, each trying to see in the other man the man they had seen at their last meeting. Finally, John said, "You look well, Jason. I knew I'd find you well. You always were one to look after yourself. And you have Martha, who looks after you. Some of the others that I met told me you had stayed home."

"Someone had to," Jason told him. "It was not a hardship. We have made a good life. We've been happy here."

"I asked about you often," Martha said. "I always asked about you. No one seemed to know."

"I've been far out," said John. "Out toward the center. There was something out there that I had to find. I went farther toward the center than any of the others. There were others who told me what was out there, or rather what might be out there, for they did not really know, and it seemed someone should go and see, and none of these others were about to go. Someone had to go. Someone had to go just as someone had to stay at home."

"Let's sit down," said Jason. "There's a lot you have to tell us, so let's be comfortable while you're telling it. Thatcher will bring in something and we can sit and talk. You are hungry, John?"

His brother shook his head.

"A drink, perhaps. All the old stuff's gone, but some of our robots are handy with moonshine of a sort. Properly aged and cared for, it is not too bad. We've tried to make wine, but this is not wine country. The soil's not right and the sun's not hot enough. It always turns out poor."

"Later on," said John. "After I have told you. Then we can have a drink."

"You went out to find the evil," Jason said. "That must be it. We know there's an evil out there. We got word of it quite some years ago. No one knew what it was—not even that it's really evil. All they knew was it had an evil smell."

"Not an evil," John told him. "Something worse than evil. A great uncaring. An intellectual uncaring. An intelligence that has lost what we think of as humanity. Perhaps not lost it, for it may have never had it. But that's not all of it. I found the People."

"The People!" Jason cried. "You can't mean that. No one ever knew. No one had the least idea…"

"Of course, no one ever knew. But I found them. They are on three planets, the planets close to one another, and they are doing very well, perhaps somewhat too well. They haven't changed. They are the same as they were five thousand years ago. They have followed to its logical conclusion the course we all were following five thousand years ago and now they are coming back to Earth. They are on their way to Earth."

A sudden wall of water slashed against the windows, driven by a wind that went howling in the eaves, far overhead.

"I do believe," said Martha, "that the storm has broken. It may be a bad one."