Its consciousness — so to speak — are swarming with hunted anxieties, grimjawed

greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping

obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean

organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface

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

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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

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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