Quality of Grace - Part Two

     It took Chickbrow less than an hour and forty minutes to drive to the shaft.
     Only one figure stood at its damp bottom next to the vault door, which was easily big enough to crush a tank. Plumb and sparsely-haired, the short figure below him fidgeted impatiently. Beads of sweat covered half the man's face, the other half a hand with a white handkerchief. The man waited, was restless when the elevator ramp lowered in the vault, then started to approach.
     "Sifted, you said? Piped?" There was the snap of 'gotsya!' in Abe Fingle's words. He halted his quick short walks back and forth at the shaft's nadir and did not suppress his growing uneasiness. Was the man before him being so vague on purpose? Or was it the loss of sleep? Fingle couldn't decide.
     The other didn't reply, but stared strangely. Abe Fingle didn't say much after that either. Instead, he surveyed Chickbrow's appearance as Chickbrow seemed to study him too, unheeded, in the gloom of the surrounding wet walls of the cavern.
     An acrid smell of musk and soggy dirt hung heavy all around. It was uncharacteristic of the former astronaut not to be explicit, or to wear an untrimmed beard. Seen up close, his hair was ragged, unkempt. The man had always been clean shaven; he had trimmed his hair once a month, every month - his file said so, even under the nerve-breaking conditions of interplanetary space expeditions. Maybe the strain had gleaned some manners from his conduct.
     "Exactly," said Chickbrow finally, making the man wait a little. His square features were set like ice, red ice. With this man, Chickbrow thought, there would be little room for artfulness and finesse, his favorite jiggling tools. We'll see, he thought, peering down at the lustrous baldness of the little round fellow.
     "That's what happens to the debris?" Abe Fingle, the stubby man from the government, drilled on, growing pink-faced. He turned, almost brushed by the other and kept on walking away. "The debris, Mr. Chickbrow," he called back, a hollow echo trailing him.
     "Right! First..."
     Chickbrow followed after him.
     Fingle's piggy eyes squeezed together to cut through the sparsely-lit tunnel and locate the maze of piping.
     I wish I could see better. It's just one big shadow in here, he thought agitated. But there were more pressing questions. Could he have rejected Chickbrow for being messy? And then take on the consequences by himself, all alone, responsible for the fate of so many--face would not be the only loss here. Fingle looked up like a man waking from a nightmare. No. Reconciliation was the answer. Fingle would have made a high wager on that. And he was not a betting man. He would have to see what this man was truly like. And take it from there.
     "...the bore's fill is sifted for precious elements, then piped underground," Chickbrow continued, good-naturedly. He offered Fingle a gracious smile this time which melted away any hint of chill remaining.
     He enjoyed watching the other.
     "Mr. Fingle," Chickbrow's tone fell half an octave and the smile waned a slight, his face now losing much of its earlier air. "Any idea why Senator West killed himself?"
     Did he know? Fingle dithered cautiously. "Didn't want to get left behind, Mr. Chickbrow."
     "That's no reason to run smack into a beacon shadow."
     "No." Fingle frowned in thought. Perhaps it was only honest to goodness curiosity. "Maybe it wasn't that he wanted to kill himself. The beacon from what we know attracts only energies and stores them in cells for later use. It does not assimilate matter or, as in the case here, a human body. Or, Senator West may have just decided to disappear, withdraw..." from what's to come, he completed silently.
     He was irritated, and holding it down with anxiety. That was too close for comfort. Being curious is one thing, being reckless another. Fingle was in a bad state of mind.
     "Beacons must have been the popular thing before being banned," said Chickbrow.
     Fingle momentarily flushed. He went ahead as though slighting what the other had said. Then, "Why such concern, Mr. Chickbrow?"
     In a year, two at most, the whole of Earth would know of the approaching devastation; of something that went terribly wrong with this planet. And Fingle had just these few months to work out a colossal number of details so a huge count of people could be rescued and saved.
     "When several thousand people just decide to stop being via the beacon shadow," Chickbrow said, "it's simply because they don't want to get left behind--from death?"
     "No, not death. 'Immortal Light' ... 'Living Light'." Fingle's voice went throaty. There was apprehension, a touch of dread in it. He discovered that he did not like sociable deliveries, not under these circumstances. With an effort he sustained his talking. "It's what the Senator once said. Satisfied, Mr. Chickbrow?"
     He had already told this man too much.
     Chickbrow was on a need-to-know clearance. As he was himself. He at once felt a rash craving to be enlightened. He speculated if Chickbrow would be as unselfish as he with information.
     Chickbrow shook his head in the twilight of the tunnel. Glittering highlights trickled from his thick red-black tufts and beard, coruscating with luster as they fell. Smeared on his cheeks and bare neck from the Carlsbad Foundry above were twenty-four carat gold specks and hair-thin slivers of unalloyed silver mixed with sweat. The shaft floor around them was littered with minute shavings the air vents brought down, forming a glistening carpet of dust; a few million dollars worth of lint.
     Fingle closed his eyes for a moment. "Ant-mites don't do that--the separating?" He switched to his former tone. That 'gotsya!' echo didn't go away.
     "That too, Mr. Fingle." Chickbrow swallowed any further remarks and impartially recounted, shining the flashlight at the rows of one-inch pipe running over their heads and into the depth of the shaft. Probably Fingle already thought of him as his property. Well, sticks and stones ... but thoughts will never hurt him.
     "The ant-mites first remove all crystals or sediment of viable worth, and the remaining rubble they carry cross-state to miscellaneous industrial, manufacturing and construction sites. The tubing is there for their protection only. And for reasons of expediency of course."
     "Of course," said Fingle, his timbre augmenting and crackling. He removed his wire-rimmed glasses and exhaled on the lenses. He wiped them clean of the gold and silver with his white folded handkerchief then dabbed his round pasty face and spangling bald head. "And once they've reached their destination they-"
     "-they double back for more, till there's not a grain left. Very efficient little workers. We're not holding back evolution, Mr. Fingle. We enhance it," commended Chickbrow. "The air in the pipe network is continuously recycled. The atmosphere is quite to their liking: not too dry or humid, slightly more oxygenated and glucose-vapored. The ant-mites must love it."
     "They must, now." Fingle's uneasiness returned. Disinclined, and with misgivings, he began to toss around a question in his head, and settled at being provoked at Chickbrow's gleam. And somewhere along this enhancement, he thought, industry and technology let loose the start that soon will wipe out civilization.
     Still, live insects, guided by the pipe, went cross-state and through hundreds of miles of routing, carrying their grain of load before returning to start the journey again.
     Fingle smiled meagerly, but his voice came out pungent with disdain. "Why must they love it, Mr. Chickbrow?" he finally asked. He raised a set of bushy, stray brows.
     Chickbrow didn't know it but he was the first man in years to see Fingle break a simile of a smile.
     "Because they're made to, Mr. Fingle," he returned, with a broad friendly grin of his own.

     A faint whine sounded. He traversed the length of the study in his wheelchair to come closer to her, before daybreak the next day. His head bent to one side and his eyes glistened with the anticipation of a much younger man's, a boy's perhaps. He wanted to tell her so much today. There were so many things trundling through his life the last few days. So many decisions to make. So little time to make them in. And the pain - ah the eternal pain. All over. At times he thought that even his fingernails hurt. There wasn't a single part of him that pain did not torment. The very hair of his scalp. The enamel of his teeth, to the minutest contrasts in hot and cold. He could not understand why he was still alive. What kept his junked body going? What kept it from utter breakdown?
     "Their pesky interruptions and meddling," he said to her. His speech was unusually severe. He must look frightful to her.
     Oh, what happened to mercy these days! he inquired, his head tilted back.
     "Slobbering about my health and how I overwork myself. Don't the fools know that I'm dying?" His head ached from the continuous hologram's effects. He tried to let go of all that nested in his mind. It was drawing blood from him. "Idiotic wishful thinkers, I can't stop them," he expelled finally. The effort to collate and analyze the myriad pieces of data was simply too much for a human mind - for any mind. And time dogged Lovesigh like a black shadow in the Sahara, never letting him in its shade, but always there, reminding him of his delimited earthly presence.
     He did not have a day pass without having pain overwhelm him. Soon they would rig him with a catheter. Then the IV. Feeding tube and lastly oxygen. After that what? he asked his thoughts. Peace for ever? Repose and foreverness? With her?
     Would she be there?
     He had put that question a thousand times. Not once having gotten an answer. Lovesigh did not trust unanswered questions. Science had taught him to go for results. He did. And the important questions, the vital ones, he got answers to. But when the singularly most important query was put forth, "Will she be there?" All was quiet.
     "Otherwise," he considered with irony in his voice, "it would have defeated the entire idea, wouldn't it?"
     He lingered...lost in a cynic's silence.
     "If they only leave me alone. Enough to get a stiffer clutch on that retarded megatherium." Lovesigh did not recognize his own voice at times.
     Giddy, he held tightly onto the armrests. He remained there cold, hands clutching.
     Several tries after, he got his slumping head to stay up straight on his gaunt neck. He finally found his voice and went on once again with her not far off.
     "Friends driveling over me," he thrashed. "Slavering acquaintances honeying up. Drooling old clots of colleagues kowtowing over my wheelchair like frayed giraffes..."
     Another part of him, You, only you abstain, his heart inside was calling out. And his longing for her leaped all that much more wanting. Many a night he would stray in his den, stay there staring at her eternal smile. From inside him came a cry of anguish. He turned away from her, to glare in the other direction balefully. It was a trifle late now, Lovesigh thought and disheartened.
     There was a monastery silence.
     Dismayed he retreated from her.
     He was turning brittle.
     He might begin fretting.
     At least he was not utterly alone.
     He felt slightly better.
     He blinked.
     Lovesigh remembered how it had been to have her wisp by him, her perfume an aura of a graceful presence, he reached out his hand ... but the memory was not happy, because it had always been followed by a vacuum too empty to endure. Now Lovesigh discovered that speaking to her removed the unoccupied silence of her absence. His hand trembling came slowly back down.
     "Do you remember...?" he asked her as he faced her again.
     He looked at her absently with large blue eyes. "...so much like a fresh awakening from an old dream ... that never ends-"
     He shook his head overcome.
     "To think of it," he then continued in an uncompromisingly severe and brisk manner.
     "People I haven't seen for millennia. The scientific community in its entirety in an upheaval."
     His neck began to stab.
     His eyes burned.
     "Counseling and exhorting and masterminding the feasible implementations of the fringe. The academicians. The rednecks. The clergy, too!" Lovesigh went on, in spite of the distressing agony, the calling for her in his heart.