New Atlantis
third “then!” — arrived
the indubitable and positive Wonder of the World, the Magic Trick, watch now,
watch, you will not believe your eyes, mama, mama, look what I can do —
    Seven lights in a row, proceeding fairly rapidly, with a
darting movement, from left to right. Proceeding less rapidly from right to
left, two dimmer, greenish lights. Two-lights halt, blink, reverse course,
proceed hastily and in a wavering manner from left to right. Seven-lights
increase speed, and catch up. Two-lights flash desperately, flicker, and are
gone.
    Seven-lights hang still for some while, then merge
gradually into one streak, veering away, and little by little vanish into the
immensity of the dark.
    But in the dark now are growing
other lights, many of them: lamps, dots, rows, scintillations — some near at hand, some far. Like the stars, yes, but
not stars. It is not the great Existences we are seeing, but only the little
lives.
    ~
    In the morning Simon told me something about the Camp, but
not until after he had had me check the apartment for bugs. I thought at first
he had been given behavior mod and gone paranoid. We never had been infested.
And I’d been living alone for a year and a half; surely they didn’t want to
hear me talking to myself? But he said, “They may have been expecting me to
come here.”
    “But they let you go free!”
    He just lay there and laughed at me. So I checked everywhere
we could think of. I didn’t find any bugs, but it did look as if somebody had
gone through the bureau drawers while I was away in the Wilderness. Simon’s
papers were all at Max’s, so that didn’t matter. I made tea on the Primus, and
washed and shaved Simon with the extra hot water in the kettle — he had a thick
beard and wanted to get rid of it because of the lice he had brought from Camp
— and while we were doing that he told me about the Camp. In fact he told me
very little, but not much was necessary.
    He had lost about 20 pounds. As he only weighed 140 to start
with, this left little to go on with. His knees and wrist bones stuck out like
rocks under the skin. His feet were all swollen and chewed-looking from the
Camp boots; he hadn’t dared take the boots off, the last three days of walking,
because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get them back on. When he had to
move or sit up so I could wash him, he shut his eyes.
    “Am I really here?” he asked. “Am I here?”
    “Yes,” I said. “You are here. What I don’t understand is how
you got here.”
    “Oh, it wasn’t bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is
to know where you’re going — to have someplace to go. You know, some of the
people in Camp, if they’d let them go, they wouldn’t have had that. They couldn’t
have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. See, my back’s all
seized up, now.”
    When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a
ninety-year-old. He couldn’t stand straight, but was all bent out of shape, and
shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the bed again,
a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the
room putting things away. He asked me to come sit by him and said I was going
to drown him if I went on crying. “You’ll submerge the entire North American
continent,” he said. I can’t remember what he said, but he made me laugh
finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when
he says them. This is not merely the partiality of affection. He makes
everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to. It is just that a mathematician’s
mind works differently from other people’s. Then when they laugh, that pleases
him.
    It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about “him,”
the man I have known for ten years, the same man, while “he” lay there changed
out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you understand why
most languages have a word like “soul.” There are various degrees of

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