Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban

succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.
    Consider this, said the train wheels, repeating the messagetirelessly moment after moment on the miles of cold iron that lay shining in the dark that led to Harwich and repeating face on face the faces reflected in the windows. Harwich achieved, the windows became empty of faces.
    Signs pointed to LADIES, GENTLEMEN, SHIPS. My passport was stamped; with the other seagoers I went up an escalator and along a glassed-in passageway from which we could see the hinged shell of the stern of the
Prinses Beatrix
lifted to receive a stream of cars.
    Having climbed the gangway and been directed by stewards to our cabins we then moved haltingly on such stairways as offered until the number on a door matched the number on a piece of paper in one’s hand. People stood in little knots of bafflement, then disappeared.
    In a little while I reappeared in the self-service restaurant, sitting at a table with my notebook, a ham sandwich, and a bottle of beer. An illuminated clock on the quayside looked in through the glassed-in side of the restaurant. The glass was steamed up and dropleted, and on this misty surface appeared a show of moving quayside shadows as the ship cast off its moorings and eased out into the North Sea. In the bright light of the restaurant people ate and drank as the geometric shadows stroked past on the whiteness of the foggy glass.
    The whiteness and the shadows withdrew from the glass as the
Prinses Beatrix
moved out. Night showed itself above the receding quayside and its many clustered bluish-white lights. Between us and those lights appeared a widening watershine. Bluish-white and yellow lights slid rearward; cranes and gantries, booms and cables and other marine articulations offered their detail growing smaller, smaller.
    Actually, said the bluish-white lights, said the yellow, there is no place whatever, no place at all. We have told you this before in topographies of emptiness and on the roads of night, you have known it looking out of strange windows. You have always known it.
    No, I said, I don’t know that. I’m not ready to know that. I have always found place, I have always had places. Death as it follows me takes away one place after another; sometimes it’s like the breaking of a string of beads; the beads all rattle on thefloor, some roll into dark corners. But my places are not yet all gone.
    Night and distance occupied the ship, hummed in the hollowness of it, throbbed in the engines of it, drove it like a line across a screen. I wondered if the Kraken felt the tremor of it, wondered if the blind and questing head of Orpheus swam before it, cleaving the darkness ahead of the bow wave and the marbling white wake that widened and vanished in the night. Certainly this night passage sang in the olive tree.
    The train for Amsterdam, chic in yellow paint with blue blazons, stood ready just outside the customs hall. With other travellers I got into it and looked out of the window at a dark tower that lifted its head above some trees and showed an illuminated clockface. On the window that I looked through there was, instead of a crossed-out cigarette, a crossed-out bottle. What a good idea to cross things out on windows, I thought. What a convenience.
    The sky as it grew lighter showed itself to be a good firm northern before-dawn sky. A resigned-looking man opposite me, very small, very moon-faced and eastern, put a black-cased radio-cassette recorder carefully between his legs like a shrine, extended the antenna, put on headphones, and sank back into the whispering of the news in his head.
    The carriage filled up with people, rucksacks, and suitcases; the train