Free The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg Page A

said, a long moment later. “You know it’s absurd, and yet you believe. Why?”
    “Because I have to,” he said. “Because it’s my only hope.”
    He stared straight at me. His eyes held a peculiarly devastated expression as though he had looked into the face of Death with them and had come away still alive, but with every option blasted, every possibility shriveled. He had heard the drums and fifes of the dead-march, at the edge of the universe. Those frosty eyes withered me. Those strangled words impaled me.
I believe,
he said.
Despite the absurdity. Because I have to. Because it’s my only hope.
A communiqué from some other planet. I could feel the chilly presence of Death there in the room with us, brushing silently past our rosy boyish cheeks.

14. Timothy
    We’re a heavy mixture, we four. How did we ever get together? What tangling of lifelines dumped us all into the same dormitory suite, anyway?
    In the beginning it was just me and Oliver, two freshmen who’d been computer-assigned to a double room overlooking the quadrangle. I was straight out of Andover and very full of my own importance. I don’t mean that I was impressed by the family money. I took that for granted, always had: everybody I grew up with was rich, so I had no real sense of how rich we were, and anyway
I
had done nothing to earn the money (nor my father, nor my father’s father, nor my father’s father’s father, et cetera, et cetera), so why should it puff me up? What swelled my head was a sense of ancestry, of knowing that I had the blood of Revolutionary War heroes in me, of senators and congressmen, of diplomats, of great nineteenth-century financiers. I was a walking slab of history. Also I enjoyed knowing that I was tall and strong and healthy—sound body, sound mind, all the natural advantages. Out beyond the campus was a world full of blacks and Jews and spastics and neurotics and homosexuals and other misfits, but I had come up three cherries on the great slot machine of life and I was proud of my luck. Also I had an allowance of one hundred dollars a week, which was convenient, and I may not actually have been aware that most eighteen-year-olds had to get along on somewhat less.
    Then there was Oliver. I figured the computer had given me a lucky dip again, because I might have been assigned somebody weird, somebody kinky, somebody with a squashed, envious, embittered soul, and Oliver seemed altogether normal. Good-looking corn-fed pre-med from the wilds of Kansas. He was my own height—an inch or so taller, in fact—and that was cool; I’m ill at ease with short men. Oliver had an uncomplicated exterior. Almost anything made him smile. An easygoing type. Both parents dead: he was here on a full scholarship. I realized right away that he had no money at all and was afraid for a minute that would cause resentment between us, but no, he was altogether levelheaded about it. Money didn’t appear to interest him as long as he had enough to pay for food and shelter and clothing, and he had that—a small inheritance, the proceeds of selling the family farm. He was amused, not threatened, by the thick roll I always carried. He told me the first day that he was planning on going out for the basketball team, and I thought he had an athletic scholarship, but I was wrong about that: he liked basketball, he took it very seriously, but he was here to
learn.
That was the real difference between us, not the Kansas thing or the money thing, but his sense of dedication. I was going to college because all the men of my family go to college between prep school and adulthood; Oliver was here to transform himself into a ferocious intellectual machine. He had—still has—tremendous, incredible, overwhelming inner drive. Now and then, those first few weeks, I caught him with his mask down; the sunny farm-boy grin vanished and his face went rigid, the jaw muscles clamping, the eyes radiating a cold gleam. His intensity could be scary. He had to