He woke at three. There was enough radiance from the moon or the night sky itself to light the room. What had waked him, he knew immediately, was not a dream, a reverie or an apprehension; it was something that moved, something that he could see, something strange and unnatural. The terror began with his optic nerves and reverberated through his whole person but it was in the beam of his eye that the terror had begun. He was able to trace the disturbance back through his nervous system to his pupil. The eye counted on reality and what he had seen or thought he had seen was the ghost of his father. The chaos set into motion by this hallucination was horrendous and he shook with psychic and physical cold, he shook with terror, and sitting up in bed he roared: “Oh, Father, Father, Father, why have you come back?”
The loudness of his voice was some consolation. The ghost seemed to leave the room. He thought he could hear stair lifts give. Had he come back to look for a bowl of crackers and milk, to read some Shakespeare, come back because he felt like all the others that the pain of death was bitter? Had he come back to relive that moment when he had relinquished the supreme privileges of youth—when he had waked feeling less peckery than usual and realized that the doctor had no cure for autumn, no medicine for the north wind? The smell of his green years would still be in his nose—the reek of clover, the fragrance of women’s breasts, so like the land-wind, smelling of grass and trees—but it was time for him to leave the field for someone younger. Spavined, gray, he had wanted no less than any youth to chase the nymphs. Over hill and dale. Now you see them; now you don’t. The world a paradise, a paradise! Father, Father, why have you come back?
There was the noise of something falling in the next room. The knowledge that this was a squirrel, as it was, would not have brought Coverly to his senses. He was too far gone. He grabbed his clothing, flew down the stairs and left the front door standing open. He stopped on the sidewalk long enough to draw on his underpants. Then he ran to the corner. Here he put on his trousers and shirt but he ran the rest of the way to Honora’s barefoot. He scribbled a farewell note, left it on her hall table and caught the milk train north, a little after dawn, past the Markhams’, past the Wilton Trace, past the Lowells’, who had changed the sign on their barn from BE KIND TO ANIMALS to GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS, past the house where old Mr. Sturgis used to live and repair watches.
Going back to Talifer where he lived with Betsey, Coverly had the choice of concluding that he was demented or that he had seen his father’s ghost. He chose the latter, of course, and yet he could not say so to his wife; he could not explain to his brother Moses why the house on River Street was empty. The specter of his father seemed to sit beside him in the plane that took him west. Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back! What, he wondered, would Leander have made of Talifer?
The site for Missile Research and Development had a population of twenty thousand, divided, like any society, whatever its aspirations, into first class, second class, third class and steerage. The large aristocracy was composed of physicists and engineers. Tradesmen made up the middle class, and there was a vast proletariat of mechanics, ground crewmen and gantry hands. Most of the aristocracy had been given underground shelters and while this fact had never been publicized it was well known that in the case of a cataclysm the proletariat would be left to scald. This made for some hard feeling. The vitals of the place were the twenty-nine gantries at the edge of the desert, the mosque-shaped atomic reactor, the underground laboratories and hangars and the two-square-mile computation and administration center. The concerns of the site were entirely extraterrestrial, and while common sense would scotch any sentimental and transparent ironies about the vastness of scientific research undertaken at Talifer and the capacity for irrational forlornness, loneliness and ecstasy among the scientists, it was a way of life that presented some strenuous intellectual contrasts.
