Wainer — Michael Shaara

Before Shaara began selling science fiction stories to fiction magazines during the 1950s, he was an amateur boxer and police officer. He later taught literature at Florida State University while continuing to write fiction. The stress of this and his cigarette smoking caused him, at the early age of 36, to have a heart failure, from which he recovered completely. His novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction during 1975. The man in the purple robe was too old to walk or stand. He was wheeled upon a purple bench into the center of a marvelous room, where unhuman beings whom we shall call "They" had gathered and waited. Because he was such an old man, he commanded a great sum of respect, but he was nervous before Them and spoke with apology, and sometimes with irritation, because he could not understand what They were thinking and it worried him. Yet there was no one left like this old man. There was no one anywhere who was as old -- but that does not matter. Old men are important not for what they have learned, but for whom they have known, and this old man had known Wainer. Therefore he spoke and told Them what he knew, and more that he did not know he was telling. And They, who were not men, sat in silence and the deepest affection, and listened. . . .