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Hellhounds of the Cosmos
The paper had gone to press, graphically describing the latest of the many horrible events which had been enacted upon the Earth in the last six months. The headlines screamed that Six Corners, a little hamlet in Pennsylvania, had been wiped out by the Horror. Another front-page story told of a Terror in the Amazon Valley which had sent the natives down the river in babbling fear. Other stories told of deaths here and there, all attributable to the “Black Horror,” as it was called.
The telephone rang.
“Hello,” said the editor.
“London calling,” came the voice of the operator.
“All right,” replied the editor.
He recognized the voice of Terry Masters, special correspondent. His voice came clearly over the transatlantic telephone.
“The Horror is attacking London in force,” he said. “There are thousands of them and they have completely surrounded the city. All roads are blocked. The government declared the city under martial rule a quarter of an hour ago and efforts are being made to prepare for resistance against the enemy.”
“Just a second,” the editor shouted into the transmitter.
He touched a button on his desk and in a moment an answering buzz told him he was in communication with the press-room.
“Stop the presses!” he yelled into the speaking tube. “Get ready for a new front make-up!”
“OK,” came faintly through the tube, and the editor turned back to the phone.
“Now let’s have it,” he said, and the voice at the London end of the wire droned on, telling the story that in another half hour was read by a world which shuddered in cold fear even as it scanned the glaring headlines.
“Woods,” said the editor of the Press to a reporter, “run over and talk to Dr. Silas White. He phoned me to send someone. Something about this Horror business.”
Henry Woods rose from his chair without a word and walked from the office. As he passed the wire machine it was tapping out, with a maddeningly methodical slowness, the story of the fall of London. Only half an hour before it had rapped forth the flashes concerning the attack on Paris and Berlin.
He passed out of the building into a street that was swarming with terrified humanity. Six months of terror, of numerous mysterious deaths, of villages blotted out, had set the world on edge. Now with London in possession of the Horror and Paris and Berlin fighting hopelessly for their lives, the entire population of the world was half insane with fright.
Exhorters on street corners enlarged upon the end of the world, asking that the people prepare for eternity, attributing the Horror to the act of a Supreme Being enraged with the wickedness of the Earth.
Expecting every moment an attack by the Horror, people left their work and gathered in the streets. Traffic, in places, had been blocked for hours and law and order were practically paralyzed. Commerce and transportation were disrupted as fright-ridden people fled from the larger cities, seeking doubtful hiding places in rural districts from the death that stalked the land.
A loudspeaker in front of a music store blared forth the latest news flashes.
“It has been learned,” came the measured tones of the announcer, “that all communication with Berlin ceased about ten minutes ago. At Paris all efforts to hold the Horror at bay have been futile. Explosives blow it apart, but have the same effect upon it as explosion has on gas. It flies apart and then reforms again, not always in the same shape as it was before. A new gas, one of the most deadly ever conceived by man, has failed to have any effect on the things. Electric guns and heat guns have absolutely no effect upon them.
“A news flash which has just come in from Rome says that a large number of the Horrors has been sighted north of that city by airmen. It seems they are attacking the capitals of the world first. Word comes from Washington that every known form of defense is being amassed at that city. New York is also preparing. …”
Henry Woods fought his way through the crowd which milled in front of the loudspeaker. The hum of excitement was giving away to a silence, the silence of a stunned people, the fearful silence of a populace facing a presence it is unable to understand, an embattled world standing with useless weapons before an incomprehensible enemy.
In despair the reporter looked about for a taxi, but realized, with a groan of resignation, that no taxi could possibly operate in that crowded street. A street car, blocked by the stream of humanity which jostled and elbowed about it, stood still, a defeated thing.
Seemingly the only man with a definite purpose in that whirlpool of terror-stricken men and women, the newspaperman settled down to the serious business of battling his way through the swarming street.
“Before I go to the crux of the matter,” said Dr. Silas White, about half an hour later, “let us first review what we know of this so-called Horror. Suppose you tell me exactly what you know of it.”
Henry Woods shifted uneasily in his chair. Why didn’t the old fool get down to business? The chief would raise hell if this story didn’t make the regular edition. He stole a glance at his wristwatch. There was still almost an hour left. Maybe he could manage it. If the old chap would only snap into it!
“I know no more,” he said, “than is common knowledge.”
The gimlet eyes of the old white-haired scientist regarded the newspaperman sharply.
“And that is?” he questioned.
There was no way out of it, thought Henry. He’d have to humor the old fellow.
“The Horror,” he replied, “appeared on Earth, so far as the knowledge of man is concerned, about six months ago.”
Dr. White nodded approvingly.
“You state the facts very aptly,” he said.
“How so?”
“When you say ‘so far as the knowledge of man is concerned.’ ”
“Why is that?”
“You will understand in due time. Please proceed.”
Vaguely the newspaperman wondered whether he was interviewing the scientist or the scientist interviewing him.
“They were first reported,” Woods said, “early this spring. At that time they wiped out a small village in the province of Quebec. All the inhabitants, except a few fugitives, were found dead, killed mysteriously and half eaten, as if by wild beasts. The fugitives were demented, babbling of black shapes that swept down out of the dark forest upon the little town in the small hours of the morning.
“The next that was heard of them was about a week later, when they struck in an isolated rural district in Poland, killing and feeding on the population of several farms. In the next week more villages were wiped out, in practically every country on the face of the Earth. From the hinterlands came tales of murder done at midnight, of men and women horribly mangled, of livestock slaughtered, of buildings crushed as if by some titanic force.
“At first they worked only at night and then, seeming to become bolder and more numerous, attacked in broad daylight.”
The newspaperman paused.
“Is that what you want?” he asked.
“That’s part of it,” replied Dr. White, “but that’s not all. What do these Horrors look like?”
“That’s more difficult,” said Henry. “They have been reported as every conceivable sort of monstrosity. Some are large and others are small. Some take the form of animals, others of birds and reptiles, and some are cast in appalling shapes such as might be snatched out of the horrid imagery of a thing which resided in a world entirely alien to our own.”
Dr. White rose from his chair and strode across the room to confront the other.
“Young man,” he asked, “do you think it possible the Horror might have come out of a world entirely alien to our own?”
“I don’t know,” replied Henry. “I know that some of the scientists believe they came from some other planet, perhaps even from some other solar system. I know they are like nothing ever known before on Earth. They are always inky black, something like black tar, you know, sort of sticky-looking, a disgusting sight. The weapons of mankind can’t affect them. Explosives are useless and so are projectiles. They wade through poison gas and fiery chemicals and seem to enjoy them. Elaborate electrical barriers have failed. Heat doesn’t make them turn a hair.”
“And you think they came from some other planet, perhaps some other solar system?”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Henry. “If they came out of space they must have come in some conveyance, and that would certainly have been sighted, picked up long before it arrived, by our astronomers. If they came in small conveyances, there must have been many of them. If they came in a single conveyance, it would be too large to escape detection. That is, unless—”
“Unless what?” snapped the scientist.
“Unless it traveled at the speed of light. Then it would have been invisible.”
“Not only invisible,” snorted the old man, “but nonexistent.”
A question was on the tip of the newspaperman’s tongue, but before it could be asked the old man was speaking again, asking a question:
“Can you imagine a fourth dimension?”
“No, I can’t,” said Henry.
“Can you imagine a thing of only two dimensions?”
“Vaguely, yes.”
The scientist smote his palms together.
“Now we’re coming to it!” he exclaimed.
Henry Woods regarded the other narrowly. The old man must be turned. What did fourth and second dimensions have to do with the Horror?
“Do you know anything about evolution?” questioned the old man.
“I have a slight understanding of it. It is the process of upward growth, the stairs by which simple organisms climb to become more complex organisms.”
Dr. White grunted and asked still another question:
“Do you know anything about the theory of the exploding universe? Have you ever noted the tendency of the perfectly balanced to run amuck?”
The reporter rose slowly to his feet.
“Dr. White,” he said, “you phoned my paper you had a story for us. I came here to get it, but all you have done is ask me questions. If you can’t tell me what you want us to publish, I will say good day.”
The doctor put forth a hand that shook slightly.
“Sit down, young man,” he said. “I don’t blame you for being impatient, but I will now come to my point.”
The newspaperman sat down again.
“I have developed a hypothesis,” said Dr. White, “and have conducted several experiments which seem to bear it out. I am staking my reputation upon the supposition that it is correct. Not only that, but I am also staking the lives of several brave men who believe implicitly in me and my theory. After all, I suppose it makes little difference, for if I fail the world is doomed, if I succeed it is saved from complete destruction.
“Have you ever thought that our evolutionists might be wrong, that evolution might be downward instead of upward? The theory of the exploding universe, the belief that all of creation is running down, being thrown off balance by the loss of energy, spurred onward by cosmic accidents which tend to disturb its equilibrium, to a time when it will run wild and space will be filled with swirling dust of disintegrated worlds, would bear out this contention.
“This does not apply to the human race. There is no question that our evolution is upward, that we have arisen from one-celled creatures wallowing in the slime of primal seas. Our case is probably paralleled by thousands of other intelligences on far-flung planets and island universes. These instances, however, running at cross purposes to the general evolutional trend of the entire cosmos, are mere flashes in the eventual course of cosmic evolution, comparing no more to eternity than a split second does to a million years.
“Taking these instances, then, as inconsequential, let us say that the trend of cosmic evolution is downward rather than upward, from complex units to simpler units rather than from simple units to more complex ones.
“Let us say that life and intelligence have degenerated. How would you say such a degeneration would take place? In just what way would it be manifested? What sort of transition would life pass through in passing from one stage to a lower one? Just what would be the nature of these stages?”
The scientist’s eyes glowed brightly as he bent forward in his chair. The newspaperman said simply: “I have no idea.”
“Man,” cried the old man, “can’t you see that it would be a matter of dimensions? From the fourth dimension to the third, from the third to the second, from the second to the first, from the first to a questionable existence or plane which is beyond our understanding or perhaps to oblivion and the end of life. Might not the fourth have evolved from a fifth, the fifth from a sixth, the sixth from a seventh, and so on to no one knows what multidimension?”
Dr. White paused to allow the other man to grasp the importance of his statements. Woods failed lamentably to do so.
“But what has this to do with the Horror?” he asked.
“Have you absolutely no imagination?” shouted the old man.
“Why, I suppose I have, but I seem to fail to understand.”
“We are facing an invasion of fourth-dimensional creatures,” the old man whispered, almost as if fearful to speak the words aloud. “We are being attacked by life which is one dimension above us in evolution. We are fighting, I tell you, a tribe of hellhounds out of the cosmos. They are unthinkably above us in the matter of intelligence. There is a chasm of knowledge between us so wide and so deep that it staggers the imagination. They regard us as mere animals, perhaps not even that. So far as they are concerned we are just fodder, something to be eaten as we eat vegetables and cereals or the flesh of domesticated animals. Perhaps they have watched us for years, watching life on the world increase, lapping their monstrous jowls over the fattening of the Earth. They have awaited the proper setting of the banquet table and now they are dining.
“Their thoughts are not our thoughts, their ideals not our ideals. Perhaps they have nothing in common with us except the primal basis of all life, self-preservation, the necessity of feeding.
“Maybe they have come of their own will. I prefer to believe that they have. Perhaps they are merely following the natural course of events, obeying some immutable law legislated by some higher being who watches over the cosmos and dictates what shall be and what shall not be. If this is true it means that there has been a flaw in my reasoning, for I believed that the life of each plane degenerated in company with the degeneration of its plane of existence, which would obey the same evolutional laws which govern the life upon it. I am quite satisfied that this invasion is a well-planned campaign, that some fourth-dimensional race has found a means of breaking through the veil of force which separates its plane from ours.”
“But,” pointed out Henry Woods, “you say they are fourth-dimensional things. I can’t see anything about them to suggest an additional dimension. They are plainly three-dimensional.”
“Of course they are three-dimensional. They would have to be to live in this world of three dimensions. The only two-dimensional objects which we know of in this world are merely illusions, projections of the third dimension, like a shadow. It is impossible for more than one dimension to live on any single plane.
“To attack us they would have to lose one dimension. This they have evidently done. You can see how utterly ridiculous it would be for you to try to attack a two-dimensional thing. So far as you were concerned it would have no mass. The same is true of the other dimensions. Similarly a being of a lesser plane could not harm an inhabitant of a higher plane. It is apparent that while the Horror has lost one material dimension, it has retained certain fourth-dimensional properties which make it invulnerable to the forces at the command of our plane.”
The newspaperman was now sitting on the edge of his chair.
“But,” he asked breathlessly, “it all sounds so hopeless. What can be done about it?”
Dr. White hitched his chair closer and his fingers closed with a fierce grasp upon the other’s knee. A militant boom came into his voice.
“My boy,” he said, “we are to strike back. We are going to invade the fourth-dimensional plane of these hellhounds. We are going to make them feel our strength. We are going to strike back.”
Henry Woods sprang to his feet.
“How?” he shouted. “Have you … ?”
Dr. White nodded.
“I have found a way to send the third-dimensional into the fourth. Come and I will show you.”
The machine was huge, but it had an appearance of simple construction. A large rectangular block of what appeared to be a strange black metal was set on end and flanked on each side by two smaller ones. On the top of the large block was set a half-globe of a strange substance, somewhat, Henry thought, like frosted glass. On one side of the large cube was set a lever, a long glass panel, two vertical tubes and three clock-face indicators. The control board, it appeared, was relatively simple.
Beside the mass of the five rectangles, on the floor, was a large plate of transparent substance, ground to a concave surface, through which one could see an intricate tangle of wire mesh.
Hanging from the ceiling, directly above the one on the floor, was another concave disk, but this one had a far more pronounced curvature.
Wires connected the two disks and each in turn was connected to the rectangular machine.
“It is a matter of the proper utilization of two forces, electrical and gravitational,” proudly explained Dr. White. “Those two forces, properly used, warp the third-dimensional into the fourth. A reverse process is used to return the object to the third. The principle of the machine is—”
The old man was about to launch into a lengthy discussion, but Henry interrupted him. A glance at his watch had shown him press time was drawing perilously close.
“Just a second,” he said. “You propose to warp a third-dimensional being into a fourth dimension. How can a third-dimensional thing exist there? You said a short time ago that only a specified dimension could exist on one single plane.”
“You have missed my point,” snapped Dr. White. “I am not sending a third-dimensional thing to a fourth dimension. I am changing the third-dimensional being into a fourth-dimensional being. I add a dimension, and automatically the being exists on a different plane. I am reversing evolution. This third dimension we now exist on evolved, millions of eons ago, from a fourth dimension. I am sending a lesser entity back over those millions of eons to a plane similar to one upon which his ancestors lived inconceivably long ago.”
“But, man, how do you know you can do it?”
The doctor’s eyes gleamed and his fingers reached out to press a bell.
A servant appeared almost at once.
“Bring me a dog,” snapped the old man. The servant disappeared.
“Young man,” said Dr. White, “I am going to show you how I know I can do it. I have done it before, now I am going to do it for you. I have sent dogs and cats back to the fourth dimension and returned them safely to this room. I can do the same with men.”
The servant reappeared, carrying in his arms a small dog. The doctor stepped to the control board of his strange machine.
“All right, George,” he said.
The servant had evidently worked with the old man enough to know what was expected of him. He stepped close to the floor disk and waited. The dog whined softly, sensing that all was not exactly right.
The old scientist slowly shoved the lever toward the right, and as he did so a faint hum filled the room, rising to a stupendous roar as he advanced the lever. From both floor disk and upper disk leaped strange cones of blue light, which met midway to form an hourglass shape of brilliance.
The light did not waver or sparkle. It did not glow. It seemed hard and brittle, like straight bars of force. The newspaperman, gazing with awe upon it, felt that terrific force was there. What had the old man said? Warp a third-dimensional being into another dimension! That would take force!
As he watched, petrified by the spectacle, the servant stepped forward and, with a flip, tossed the little dog into the blue light. The animal could be discerned for a moment through the light and then it disappeared.
“Look in the globe!” shouted the old man; and Henry jerked his eyes from the column of light to the half-globe atop the machine.
He gasped. In the globe, deep within its milky center, glowed a picture that made his brain reel as he looked upon it. It was a scene such as no man could have imagined unaided. It was a horribly distorted projection of an eccentric landscape, a landscape hardly analogous to anything on Earth.
“That’s the fourth dimension, sir,” said the servant.
“That’s not the fourth dimension,” the old man corrected him. “That’s a third-dimensional impression of the fourth dimension. It is no more the fourth dimension than a shadow is three-dimensional. It, like a shadow, is merely a projection. It gives us a glimpse of what the fourth plane is like. It is a shadow of that plane.”
Slowly a dark blotch began to grow in the landscape. Slowly it assumed definite form. It puzzled the reporter. It looked familiar. He could have sworn he had seen it somewhere before. It was alive, for it had moved.
“That, sir, is the dog,” George volunteered.
“That was the dog,” Dr. White again corrected him. “God knows what it is now.”
He turned to the newspaperman.
“Have you seen enough?” he demanded.
Henry nodded.
The other slowly began to return the lever to its original position. The roaring subsided, the light faded, the projection in the half-globe grew fainter.
“How are you going to use it?” asked the newspaperman.
“I have ninety-eight men who have agreed to be projected into the fourth dimension to seek out the entities that are attacking us and attack them in turn. I shall send them out in an hour.”
“Where is there a phone?” asked the newspaperman.
“In the next room,” replied Dr. White.
As the reporter dashed out of the door, the light faded entirely from between the two disks and on the lower one a little dog crouched, quivering, softly whimpering.
The old man stepped from the controls and approached the disk. He scooped the little animal from where it lay into his arms and patted the silky head.
“Good dog,” he murmured; and the creature snuggled close to him, comforted, already forgetting that horrible place from which it had just returned.
“Is everything ready, George?” asked the old man.
“Yes, sir,” replied the servant. “The men are all ready, even anxious to go. If you ask me, sir, they are a tough lot.”
“They are as brave a group of men as ever graced the Earth,” replied the scientist gently. “They are adventurers, every one of whom has faced danger and will not shrink from it. They are born fighters. My one regret is that I have not been able to secure more like them. A thousand men such as they should be able to conquer any opponent. It was impossible. The others were poor soft fools. They laughed in my face. They thought I was an old fool—I, the man who alone stands between them and utter destruction.”
His voice had risen to almost a scream, but it again sank to a normal tone.
“I may be sending ninety-eight brave men to instant death. I hope not.”
“You can always jerk them back, sir,” suggested George.
“Maybe I can, maybe not,” murmured the old man.
Henry Woods appeared in the doorway.
“When do we start?” he asked.
“We?” exclaimed the scientist.
“Certainly, you don’t believe you’re going to leave me out of this. Why, man, it’s the greatest story of all time. I’m going as special war correspondent.”
“They believed it? They are going to publish it?” cried the old man, clutching at the newspaperman’s sleeve.
“Well, the editor was skeptical at first, but after I swore on all sorts of oaths it was true, he ate it up. Maybe you think that story didn’t stop the presses!”
“I didn’t expect them to. I just took a chance. I thought they, too, would laugh at me.”
“But when do we start?” persisted Henry.
“You are really in earnest? You really want to go?” asked the old man, unbelievingly.
“I am going. Try to stop me.”
Dr. White glanced at his watch.
“We will start in exactly thirty-four minutes,” he said.
“Ten seconds to go.” George, standing with watch in hand, spoke in a precise manner, the very crispness of his words betraying the excitement under which he labored.
The blue light, hissing, drove from disk to disk; the room thundered with the roar of the machine, before which stood Dr. White, his hand on the lever, his eyes glued on the instruments before him.
In a line stood the men who were to fling themselves into the light to be warped into another dimension, there to seek out and fight an unknown enemy. The line was headed by a tall man with hands like hams, with a weather-beaten face and a wild mop of hair. Behind him stood a belligerent little cockney. Henry Woods stood fifth in line. They were a motley lot, adventurers every one of them, and some were obviously afraid as they stood before that column of light, with only a few seconds of the third dimension left to them. They had answered a weird advertisement, and had but a limited idea of what they were about to do. Grimly, though, they accepted it as a job, a bizarre job, but a job. They faced it as they had faced other equally dangerous, but less unusual, jobs.
“Five seconds,” snapped George.
The lever was all the way over now. The half-globe showed, within its milky interior, a hideously distorted landscape. The light had taken on a hard, brittle appearance and its hiss had risen to a scream. The machine thundered steadily with a suggestion of horrible power.
“Time up!”
The tall man stepped forward. His foot reached the disk; another step and he was bathed in the light, a third and he glimmered momentarily, then vanished. Close on his heels followed the little cockney.
With his nerves at almost a snapping point, Henry moved on behind the fourth man. He was horribly afraid, he wanted to break from the line and run, it didn’t matter where, any place to get away from that steady, steely light in front of him. He had seen three men step into it, glow for a second, and then disappear. A fourth man had placed his foot on the disk.
Cold sweat stood out on his brow. Like an automaton he placed one foot on the disk. The fourth man had already disappeared.
“Snap into it, pal,” growled the man behind.
Henry lifted the other foot, caught his toe on the edge of the disk and stumbled headlong into the column of light.
He was conscious of intense heat which was instantly followed by equally intense cold. For a moment his body seemed to be under enormous pressure, then it seemed to be expanding, flying apart, bursting, exploding. …
He felt solid ground under his feet, and his eyes, snapping open, saw an alien land. It was a land of somber color, with great gray moors, and beetling black cliffs. There was something queer about it, an intangible quality that baffled him.
He looked about him, expecting to see his companions. He saw no one. He was absolutely alone in that desolate brooding land. Something dreadful had happened! Was he the only one to be safely transported from the third dimension? Had some horrible accident occurred? Was he alone?
Sudden panic seized him. If something had happened, if the others were not here, might it not be possible that the machine would not be able to bring him back to his own dimension? Was he doomed to remain marooned forever in this terrible plane?
He looked down at his body and gasped in dismay. It was not his body!
It was a grotesque caricature of a body, a horrible profane mass of flesh, like a phantasmagoric beast snatched from the dreams of a lunatic.
It was real, however. He felt it with his hands, but they were not hands. They were something like hands; they served the same purpose that hands served in the third dimension. He was, he realized, a being of the fourth dimension, but in his fourth-dimensional brain still clung hard-fighting remnants of that faithful old third-dimensional brain. He could not, as yet, see with fourth-dimensional eyes, think purely fourth-dimensional thoughts. He had not oriented himself as yet to this new plane of existence. He was seeing the fourth dimension through the blurred lenses of millions of eons of third-dimensional existence. He was seeing it much more clearly than he had seen it in the half-globe atop the machine in Dr. White’s laboratory, but he would not see it clearly until every vestige of the third dimension was wiped from him. That, he knew, would come in time.
He felt his weird body with those things that served as hands, and he found, beneath his groping, unearthly fingers, great rolling muscles, powerful tendons, and hard, well-conditioned flesh. A sense of well-being surged through him and he growled like an animal, like an animal of that horrible fourth plane.
But the terrible sounds that came from between his slobbering lips were not those of his own voice, they were the voices of many men.
Then he knew. He was not alone. Here, in this one body were the bodies, the brains, the power, the spirit, of those other ninety-eight men. In the fourth dimension, all the millions of third-dimensional things were one. Perhaps that particular portion of the third dimension called the Earth had sprung from, or degenerated from, one single unit of a dissolving, worn-out fourth dimension. The third dimension, warped back to a higher plane, was automatically obeying the mystic laws of evolution by reforming in the shape of that old ancestor, unimaginably removed in time from the race he had begot. He was no longer Henry Woods, newspaperman; he was an entity that had given birth, in the dim ages when the Earth was born, to a third dimension. Nor was he alone. This body of his was composed of other sons of that ancient entity.
He felt himself grow, felt his body grow vaster, assume greater proportions, felt new vitality flow through him. It was the other men, the men who were flinging themselves into the column of light in the laboratory to be warped back to this plane, to be incorporated in his body.
It was not his body, however. His brain was not his alone. The pronoun, he realized, represented the sum total of those other men, his fellow adventurers.
Suddenly a new feeling came, a feeling of completeness, a feeling of supreme fitness. He knew that the last of the ninety-eight men had stepped across the disk, that all were here in this giant body.
Now he could see more clearly. Things in the landscape, which had escaped him before, became recognizable. Awful thoughts ran through his brain, heavy, ponderous, black thoughts. He began to recognize the landscape as something familiar, something he had seen before, a thing with which he was intimate. Phenomena, which his third-dimensional intelligence would have gasped at, became commonplace. He was finally seeing through fourth-dimensional eyes, thinking fourth-dimensional thoughts.
Memory seeped into his brain and he had fleeting visions, visions of dark caverns lit by hellish flames, of huge seas that battered remorselessly with mile-high waves against towering headlands that reared titanic toward a glowering sky. He remembered a red desert scattered with scarlet boulders, he remembered silver cliffs of gleaming metallic stone. Through all his thoughts ran something else, a scarlet thread of hate, an all-consuming passion, a fierce lust after the life of some other entity.
He was no longer a composite thing built of third-dimensional beings. He was a creature of another plane, a creature with a consuming hate, and suddenly he knew against whom this hate was directed and why. He knew also that this creature was near and his great fists closed and then spread wide as he knew it. How did he know it? Perhaps through some sense which he, as a being of another plane, held, but which was alien to the Earth. Later, he asked himself this question. At the time, however, there was no questioning on his part. He only knew that somewhere near was a hated enemy and he did not question the source of his knowledge. …
Mumbling in an idiom incomprehensible to a third-dimensional being, filled with rage that wove redly through his brain, he lumbered down the hill onto the moor, his great strides eating up the distance, his footsteps shaking the ground.
At the foot of the hill he halted and from his throat issued a challenging roar that made the very crags surrounding the moor tremble. The rocks flung back the roar as if in mockery.
Again he shouted and in the shout he framed a lurid insult to the enemy that lurked there in the cliffs.
Again the crags flung back the insult, but this time the echoes, booming over the moor, were drowned by another voice, the voice of the enemy.
At the far end of the moor appeared a gigantic form, a form that shambled on grotesque, misshapen feet, growling angrily as he came.
He came rapidly despite his clumsy gait, and as he came he mouthed terrific threats.
Close to the other he halted and only then did recognition dawn in his eyes.
“You, Mal Shaff?” he growled in his guttural tongue, and surprise and consternation were written large upon his ugly face.
“Yes, it is I, Mal Shaff,” boomed the other. “Remember, Ouglat, the day you destroyed me and my plane. I have returned to wreak my vengeance. I have solved a mystery you have never guessed and I have come back. You did not imagine you were attacking me again when you sent your minions to that other plane to feed upon the beings there. It was I you were attacking, fool, and I am here to kill you.”
Ouglat leaped and the thing that had been Henry Woods, newspaperman, and ninety-eight other men, but was now Mal Shaff of the fourth dimension, leaped to meet him.
Mal Shaff felt the force of Ouglat, felt the sharp pain of a hammering fist, and lashed out with those horrible arms of his to smash at the leering face of his antagonist. He felt his fists strike solid flesh, felt the bones creak and tremble beneath his blow.
His nostrils were filled with the terrible stench of the other’s foul breath and his filthy body. He teetered on his gnarled legs and sidestepped a vicious kick and then stepped in to gouge with straightened thumb at the other’s eye. The thumb went true and Ouglat howled in pain.
Mal Shaff leaped back as his opponent charged head down, and his knotted fist beat a thunderous tattoo as the misshapen beast closed in. He felt clawing fingers seeking his throat, felt ghastly nails ripping at his shoulders. In desperation he struck blindly, and Ouglat reeled away. With a quick stride he shortened the distance between them and struck Ouglat a hard blow squarely on his slavering mouth. Pressing hard upon the reeling figure, he swung his fists like sledgehammers, and Ouglat stumbled, falling in a heap on the sand.
Mal Shaff leaped upon the fallen foe and kicked him with his taloned feet, ripping him wickedly. There was no thought of fair play, no faintest glimmer of mercy. This was a battle to the death: there could be no quarter.
The fallen monster howled, but his voice cut short as his foul mouth, with its razor-edged fangs, closed on the other’s body. His talons, seeking a hold, clawed deep.
Mal Shaff, his brain a screaming maelstrom of weird emotions, aimed pile-driver blows at the enemy, clawed and ripped. Together the two rolled, locked tight in titanic battle, on the sandy plain and a great cloud of heavy dust marked where they struggled.
In desperation Ouglat put every ounce of his strength into a heave that broke the other’s grip and flung him away.
The two monstrosities surged to their feet, their eyes red with hate, glaring through the dust cloud at one another.
Slowly Ouglat’s hand stole to a black, wicked cylinder that hung on a belt at his waist. His fingers closed upon it and he drew the weapon. As he leveled it at Mal Shaff, his lips curled back and his features distorted into something that was not pleasant to see.
Mal Shaff, with doubled fists, saw the great thumb of his enemy slowly depressing a button on the cylinder, and a great fear held him rooted in his tracks. In the back of his brain something was vainly trying to explain to him the horror of this thing which the other held.
Then a multicolored spiral, like a corkscrew column of vapor, sprang from the cylinder and flashed toward him. It struck him full on the chest and even as it did so he caught the ugly fire of triumph in the red eyes of his enemy.
He felt a stinging sensation where the spiral struck, but that was all. He was astounded. He had feared this weapon, had been sure it portended some form of horrible death. But all it did was to produce a slight sting.
For a split second he stood stock-still, then he surged forward and advanced upon Ouglat, his hands outspread like claws. From his throat came those horrible sounds, the speech of the fourth dimension.
“Did I not tell you, foul son of Sargouthe, that I had solved a mystery you have never guessed at? Although you destroyed me long ago, I have returned. Throw away your puny weapon. I am of the lower dimension and am invulnerable to your engines of destruction. You bloated. …” His words trailed off into a stream of vileness that could never have occurred to a third-dimensional mind.
Ouglat, with every line of his face distorted with fear, flung the weapon from him, and turning, fled clumsily down the moor, with Mal Shaff at his heels.
Steadily Mal Shaff gained and with only a few feet separating him from Ouglat, he dived with outspread arms at the other’s legs.
The two came down together, but Mal Shaff’s grip was broken by the fall and the two regained their feet at almost the same instant.
The wild moor resounded to their throaty roaring and the high cliffs flung back the echoes of the bellowing of the two gladiators below. It was sheer strength now and flesh and bone were bruised and broken under the life-shaking blows that they dealt. Great furrows were plowed in the sand by the sliding of heavy feet as the two fighters shifted to or away from attack. Blood, blood of fourth-dimensional creatures, covered the bodies of the two and stained the sand with its horrible hue. Perspiration streamed from them and their breath came in gulping gasps.
The lurid sun slid across the purple sky and still the two fought on. Ouglat, one of the ancients, and Mal Shaff, reincarnated. It was a battle of giants, a battle that must have beggared even the titanic tilting of forgotten gods and entities in the ages when the third-dimensional Earth was young.
Mal Shaff had no conception of time. He may have fought seconds or hours. It seemed an eternity. He had attempted to fight scientifically, but had failed to do so. While one part of him had cried out to elude his opponent, to wait for openings, to conserve his strength, another part had shouted at him to step in and smash, smash, smash at the hated monstrosity pitted against him.
It seemed Ouglat was growing in size, had become more agile, that his strength was greater. His punches hurt more; it was harder to hit him.
Still Mal Shaff drilled in determinedly, head down, fists working like pistons. As the other seemed to grow stronger and larger, he seemed to become smaller and weaker.
It was queer. Ouglat should be tired, too. His punches should be weaker. He should move more slowly, be heavier on his feet.
There was no doubt of it. Ouglat was growing larger, was drawing on some mysterious reserve of strength. From somewhere new force and life were flowing into his body. But from where was this strength coming?
A huge fist smashed against Mal Shaff’s jaw. He felt himself lifted, and the next moment he skidded across the sand.
Lying there, gasping for breath, almost too fagged to rise, with the black bulk of the enemy looming through the dust cloud before him, he suddenly realized the source of the other’s renewed strength.
Ouglat was recalling his minions from the third dimension! They were incorporating in his body, returning to their parent body!
They were coming back from the third dimension to the fourth dimension to fight a third-dimensional thing reincarnated in the fourth-dimensional form it had lost millions of eons ago!
This was the end, thought Mal Shaff. But he staggered to his feet to meet the charge of the ancient enemy and a grim song, a death chant immeasurably old, suddenly and dimly remembered from out of the mists of countless millenniums, was on his lips as he swung a pile-driver blow into the suddenly astonished face of the rushing Ouglat. …
The milky globe atop the machine in Dr. White’s laboratory glowed softly, and within that glow two figures seemed to struggle.
Before the machine, his hands still on the controls, stood Dr. Silas White. Behind him the room was crowded with newspapermen and photographers.
Hours had passed since the ninety-eight men—ninety-nine, counting Henry Woods—had stepped into the brittle column of light to be shunted back through unguessed time to a different plane of existence. The old scientist, during all those hours, had stood like a graven image before his machine, eyes staring fixedly at the globe.
Through the open windows he had heard the cry of the newsboy as the Press put the greatest scoop of all time on the street. The phone had rung like mad and George answered it. The doorbell buzzed repeatedly and George ushered in newspapermen who had asked innumerable questions, to which he had replied briefly, almost mechanically. The reporters had fought for the use of the one phone in the house and had finally drawn lots for it. A few had raced out to use other phones.
Photographers came and flashes popped and cameras clicked. The room was in an uproar. On the rare occasions when the reporters were not using the phone the instrument buzzed shrilly. Authoritative voices demanded Dr. Silas White. George, his eyes on the old man, stated that Dr. Silas White could not be disturbed, that he was busy.
From the street below came the heavy-throated hum of thousands of voices. The street was packed with a jostling crowd of awed humanity, every eye fastened on the house of Dr. Silas White. Lines of police held them back.
“What makes them move so slowly?” asked a reporter, staring at the globe. “They hardly seem to be moving. It looks like a slow motion picture.”
“They are not moving slowly,” replied Dr. White. “There must be a difference in time in the fourth dimension. Maybe what is hours to us is only seconds to them. Time must flow more slowly there. Perhaps it is a bigger place than this third plane. That may account for it. They aren’t moving slowly, they are fighting savagely. It’s a fight to the death! Watch!”
The grotesque arm of one of the figures in the milky globe was moving out slowly, loafing along, aimed at the head of the other. Slowly the other twisted his body aside, but too slowly. The fist finally touched the head, still moving slowly forward, the body following as slowly. The head of the creature twisted, bent backward, and the body toppled back in a leisurely manner.
“What does White say? … Can’t you get a statement of some sort from him? Won’t he talk at all? A hell of a fine reporter you are—can’t even get a man to open his mouth. Ask him about Henry Woods. Get a human-interest slant on Woods walking into the light. Ask him how long this is going to last. Damn it all, man, do something, and don’t bother me again until you have a real story—yes, I said a real story—are you hard of hearing? For God’s sake, do something!”
The editor slammed the receiver on the hook.
“Brooks,” he snapped, “get the War Department at Washington. Ask them if they’re going to back up White. Go on, go on. Get busy. … How will you get them? I don’t know. Just get them, that’s all. Get them!”
Typewriters gibbered like chuckling morons through the roaring tumult of the editorial rooms. Copy boys rushed about, white sheets clutched in their grimy hands. Telephones jangled and strident voices blared through the haze that arose from the pipes and cigarettes of perspiring writers who feverishly transferred to paper the startling events that were rocking the world.
The editor, his necktie off, his shirt open, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, drummed his fingers on the desk. It had been a hectic twenty-four hours and he had stayed at the desk every minute of the time. He was dead tired. When the moment of relaxation came, when the tension snapped, he knew he would fall into an exhausted stupor of sleep, but the excitement was keeping him on his feet. There was work to do. There was news such as the world had never known before. Each new story meant a new front make-up, another extra. Even now the presses were thundering, even now papers with the ink hardly dry upon them were being snatched by the avid public from the hands of screaming newsboys.
A man raced toward the city desk, waving a sheet of paper in his hand. Sensing something unusual the others in the room crowded about as he laid the sheet before the editor.
“Just came in,” the man gasped.
The paper was a wire dispatch. It read:
“Rome—The Black Horror is in full retreat. Although still apparently immune to the weapons being used against it, it is lifting the siege of this city. The cause is unknown.”
The editor ran his eye down the sheet. There was another dateline:
“Madrid—The Black Horror, which has enclosed this city in a ring of dark terror for the last two days, is fleeing, rapidly disappearing. …”
The editor pressed a button. There was an answering buzz.
“Composing room,” he shouted, “get ready for a new front! Yes, another extra. This will knock their eyes out!”
A telephone jangled furiously. The editor seized it.
“Yes. What was that? … White says he must have help. I see. Woods and the others are weakening. Being badly beaten, eh? … More men needed to go out to the other plane. Wants reinforcements. Yes. I see. Well, tell him that he’ll have them. If he can wait half an hour we’ll have them walking by thousands into that light. I’ll be damned if we won’t! Just tell White to hang on! We’ll have the whole nation coming to the rescue!”
He jabbed up the receiver.
“Richards,” he said, “write a streamer, ‘Help Needed,’ ‘Reinforcements Called’—something of that sort, you know. Make it scream. Tell the foreman to dig out the biggest type he has. A foot high. If we ever needed big type, we need it now!”
He turned to the telephone.
“Operator,” he said, “get me the Secretary of War at Washington. The secretary in person, you understand. No one else will do.”
He turned again to the reporters who stood about the desk.
“In two hours,” he explained, banging the desk top for emphasis, “we’ll have the United States Army marching into that light Woods walked into!”
The bloody sun was touching the edge of the weird world, seeming to hesitate before taking the final plunge behind the towering black crags that hung above the ink-pot shadows at their base. The purple sky had darkened until it was almost the color of soft, black velvet. Great stars were blazing out.
Ouglat loomed large in the gathering twilight, a horrible misshapen ogre of an outer world. He had grown taller, broader, greater. Mal Shaff’s head now was on a level with the other’s chest; his huge arms seemed toylike in comparison with those of Ouglat, his legs mere pipestems.
Time and time again he had barely escaped as the clutching hands of Ouglat reached out to grasp him. Once within those hands he would be torn apart.
The battle had become a game of hide and seek, a game of cat and mouse, with Mal Shaff the mouse.
Slowly the sun sank and the world became darker. His brain working feverishly, Mal Shaff waited for the darkness. Adroitly he worked the battle nearer and nearer to the Stygian darkness that lay at the foot of the mighty crags. In the darkness he might escape. He could no longer continue this unequal fight. Only escape was left.
The sun was gone now. Blackness was dropping swiftly over the land, like a great blanket, creating the illusion of the glowering sky descending to the ground. Only a few feet away lay the total blackness under the cliffs.
Like a flash Mal Shaff darted into the blackness, was completely swallowed in it. Roaring, Ouglat followed.
His shoulders almost touching the great rock wall that shot straight up hundreds of feet above him, Mal Shaff ran swiftly, fear lending speed to his shivering legs. Behind him he heard the bellowing of his enemy. Ouglat was searching for him, a hopeless search in that total darkness. He would never find him. Mal Shaff felt sure.
Fagged and out of breath, he dropped panting at the foot of the wall. Blood pounded through his head and his strength seemed to be gone. He lay still and stared out into the less dark moor that stretched before him.
For some time he lay there, resting. Aimlessly he looked out over the moor, and then he suddenly noted, some distance to his right, a hill rising from the moor. The hill was vaguely familiar. He remembered it dimly as being of great importance.
A sudden inexplicable restlessness filled him. Far behind him he heard the enraged bellowing of Ouglat, but that he scarcely noticed. So long as darkness lay upon the land he knew he was safe from his enemy.
The hill had made him restless. He must reach the top. He could think of no logical reason for doing so. Obviously he was safer here at the base of the cliff, but a voice seemed to be calling, a friendly voice from the hilltop.
He rose on aching legs and forged ahead. Every fiber of his being cried out in protest, but resolutely he placed one foot ahead of the other, walking mechanically.
Opposite the hill he disregarded the strange call that pulsed down upon him, long enough to rest his tortured body. He must build up his strength for the climb.
He realized that danger lay ahead. Once he quitted the blackness of the cliff’s base, Ouglat, even in the darkness that lay over the land, might see him. That would be disastrous. Once over the top of the hill he would be safe.
Suddenly the landscape was bathed in light, a soft green radiance. One moment it had been pitch dark, the next it was light, as if a giant searchlight had been snapped on.
In terror, Mal Shaff looked for the source of the light. Just above the horizon hung a great green orb, which moved up the ladder of the sky even as he watched.
A moon! A huge green satellite hurtling swiftly around this cursed world!
A great, overwhelming fear sat upon Mal Shaff and with a high, shrill scream of anger he raced forward, forgetful of aching body and outraged lungs.
His scream was answered from far off, and out of the shadows of the cliffs toward the far end of the moor a black figure hurled itself. Ouglat was on the trail!
Mal Shaff tore madly up the slope, topped the crest, and threw himself flat on the ground, almost exhausted.
A queer feeling stole over him, a queer feeling of well-being. New strength was flowing into him, the old thrill of battle was pounding through his blood once more.
Not only were queer things happening to his body, but also to his brain. The world about him looked queer, held a sort of an intangible mystery he could not understand. A half question formed in the back of his brain. Who and what was he? Queer thoughts to be thinking! He was Mal Shaff, but had he always been Mal Shaff?
He remembered a brittle column of light, creatures with bodies unlike his body, walking into it. He had been one of those creatures. There was something about dimensions, about different planes, a plan for one plane to attack another!
He scrambled to his bowed legs and beat his great chest with mighty, long-nailed hands. He flung back his head and from his throat broke a sound to curdle the blood of even the bravest.
On the moor below Ouglat heard the cry and answered it with one equally ferocious.
Mal Shaff took a step forward, then stopped stock-still. Through his brain went a sharp command to return to the spot where he had stood, to wait there until attacked. He stepped back, shifting his feet impatiently.
He was growing larger; every second fresh vitality was pouring into him. Before his eyes danced a red curtain of hate and his tongue roared forth a series of insulting challenges to the figure that was even now approaching the foot of the hill.
As Ouglat climbed the hill, the night became an insane bedlam. The challenging roars beat like surf against the black cliffs.
Ouglat’s lips were flecked with foam, his red eyes were mere slits, his mouth worked convulsively.
They were only a few feet apart when Ouglat charged.
Mal Shaff was ready for him. There was no longer any difference in their size and they met like the two forward walls of contending football teams.
Mal Shaff felt the soft throat of the other under his fingers and his grip tightened. Maddened, Ouglat shot terrific blow after terrific blow into Mal Shaff’s body.
Try as he might, however, he could not shake the other’s grip.
It was silent now. The night seemed brooding, watching the struggle on the hilltop.
Larger and larger grew Mal Shaff, until he overtopped Ouglat like a giant.
Then he loosened his grip and, as Ouglat tried to scuttle away, reached down to grasp him by the nape of his neck.
High above his head he lifted his enemy and dashed him to the ground. With a leap he was on the prostrate figure, trampling it apart, smashing it into the ground. With wild cries he stamped the earth, treading out the last of Ouglat, the Black Horror.
When no trace of the thing that had been Ouglat remained, he moved away and viewed the trampled ground.
Then, for the first time he noticed that the crest of the hill was crowded with other monstrous figures. He glared at them, half in surprise, half in anger. He had not noticed their silent approach.
“It is Mal Shaff!” cried one.
“Yes, I am Mal Shaff. What do you want?”
“But, Mal Shaff, Ouglat destroyed you once long ago!”
“And I, just now,” replied Mal Shaff, “have destroyed Ouglat.”
The figures were silent, shifting uneasily. Then one stepped forward.
“Mal Shaff,” it said, “we thought you were dead. Apparently it was not so. We welcome you to our land again. Ouglat, who once tried to kill you and apparently failed, you have killed, which is right and proper. Come and live with us again in peace. We welcome you.”
Mal Shaff bowed.
Gone was all thought of the third dimension. Through Mal Shaff’s mind raced strange, haunting memories of a red desert scattered with scarlet boulders, of silver cliffs of gleaming metallic stone, of huge seas battering against towering headlands. There were other things, too. Great palaces of shining jewels, and weird nights of inhuman joy where hellish flames lit deep, black caverns.
He bowed again.
“I thank you, Bathazar,” he said.
Without a backward look he shambled down the hill with the others.
“Yes?” said the editor. “What’s that you say? Doctor White is dead! A suicide! Yeah, I understand. Worry, hey! Here, Roberts, take this story.”
He handed over the phone.
“When you write it,” he said, “play up the fact he was worried about not being able to bring the men back to the third dimension. Give him plenty of praise for ending the Black Horror. It’s a big story.”
“Sure,” said Roberts, then spoke into the phone: “All right, Bill, shoot the works.”
The Street That Wasn’t There
By Clifford D. Simak and Carl Jacobi
Mr. Jonathon Chambers left his house on Maple Street at exactly in the evening and set out on the daily walk he had taken, at the same time, come rain or snow, for twenty solid years.
The walk never varied. He paced two blocks down Maple Street, stopped at the Red Star confectionery to buy a Rose Trofero perfecto, then walked to the end of the fourth block on Maple. There he turned right on Lexington, followed Lexington to Oak, down Oak and so by way of Lincoln back to Maple again and to his home.
He didn’t walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his front door at exactly . No one ever stopped to talk with him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr. Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr. Chambers took his cigar. That was all.
For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once had been a professor at State University.
A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was connected with his name … at the time an academic scandal. He had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.
A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers started out at .
It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.
He walked unhurriedly, swinging his cane a bit less jauntily than twenty years ago. He tucked the muffler more securely under the rusty old topcoat and pulled his bowler hat more firmly on his head.
He noticed that the street light at the corner of Maple and Jefferson was out and he grumbled a little to himself when he was forced to step off the walk to circle a boarded-off section of newly-laid concrete work before the driveway of 816.
It seemed that he reached the corner of Lexington and Maple just a bit too quickly, but he told himself that this couldn’t be. For he never did that. For twenty years, since the year following his expulsion from the university, he had lived by the clock.
The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed existence had grown on him gradually.
So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.
A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.
“… still taking place … Empire State building disappeared … thin air … famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt. …”
The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas, probably. He remembered one from many years before, something about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book Mr. Chambers had written.
But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again, looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing … absolutely nothing in the world … that he would let upset him. That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.
There was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers caught some excited words: “It’s happening everywhere. … What do you think it is. … The scientists can’t explain. …”
But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not wish to talk.
One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.
Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his pocket.
He started violently. It was only !
For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in accusation. The timepiece hadn’t stopped, for it still ticked audibly.
But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he had started out at and returned at . Now. …
It wasn’t until then that he realized something else was wrong. He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase his evening smoke.
Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his house and locked the door behind him.
He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he shook his head in bewilderment.
Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.
But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had loved music … the kind of music he could get by tuning in symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.
He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter, unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.
But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn’t see him coming.
And so he knew that this was the year and that the wars in Europe and Asia had flamed to an end to be followed by a terrible plague, a plague that even now was sweeping through country after country like wild fire, decimating populations. A plague undoubtedly induced by hunger and privation and the miseries of war.
But those things he put away as items far removed from his own small world. He disregarded them. He pretended he had never heard of them. Others might discuss and worry over them if they wished. To him they simply did not matter.
But there were two things tonight that did matter. Two curious, incredible events. He had arrived home fifteen minutes early. He had forgotten his cigar.
Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to have something like that happen. There must be something wrong. Had his long exile finally turned his mind … perhaps just a very little … enough to make him queer? Had he lost his sense of proportion, of perspective?
No, he hadn’t. Take this room, for example. After twenty years it had come to be as much a part of him as the clothes he wore. Every detail of the room was engraved in his mind with … clarity; the old center leg table with its green covering and stained glass lamp; the mantelpiece with the dusty bric-a-brac; the pendulum clock that told the time of day as well as the day of the week and month; the elephant ash tray on the tabaret and, most important of all, the marine print.
Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague outline of a larger vessel.
There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head. He had put it there because he liked it best.
Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither define nor understand.
When finally he dozed off it was to lose himself in a series of horrific dreams. He dreamed first that he was a castaway on a tiny islet in mid-ocean, that the waters around the island teemed with huge poisonous sea snakes … hydrophinnae … and that steadily those serpents were devouring the island.
In another dream he was pursued by a horror which he could neither see nor hear, but only could imagine. And as he sought to flee he stayed in the one place. His legs worked frantically, pumping like pistons, but he could make no progress. It was as if he ran upon a treadway.
Then again the terror descended on him, a black, unimagined thing and he tried to scream and couldn’t. He opened his mouth and strained his vocal cords and filled his lungs to bursting with the urge to shriek … but not a sound came from his lips.
All next day he was uneasy and as he left the house that evening, at precisely , he kept saying to himself: “You must not forget tonight! You must remember to stop and get your cigar!”
The street light at the corner of Jefferson was still out and in front of 816 the cemented driveway was still boarded off. Everything was the same as the night before.
And now, he told himself, the Red Star confectionery is in the next block. I must not forget tonight. To forget twice in a row would be just too much.
He grasped that thought firmly in his mind, strode just a bit more rapidly down the street.
But at the corner he stopped in consternation. Bewildered, he stared down the next block. There was no neon sign, no splash of friendly light upon the sidewalk to mark the little store tucked away in this residential section.
He stared at the street marker and read the word slowly: Grant. He read it again, unbelieving, for this shouldn’t be Grant Street, but Marshall. He had walked two blocks and the confectionery was between Marshall and Grant. He hadn’t come to Marshall yet … and here was Grant.
Or had he, absentmindedly, come one block farther than he thought, passed the store as on the night before?
For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact grew slowly in his brain:
There wasn’t any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant had disappeared!
Now he understood why he had missed the store on the night before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.
On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way unsteadily to his chair in the corner.
What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?
Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded life, knew nothing about?
Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat, then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something … somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half whispered thought.
A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence … but a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.
There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself. Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.
He brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues. Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America, of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread into that nation’s boundaries.
Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South America. Billions, perhaps.
And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life, seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled brain failed to find the answer.
The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood upon the mantel.
Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and looked out.
Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.
But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was strangely lopsided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a house that suddenly had gone mad.
He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid piece of mid-Victorian architecture.
Then, before his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly it drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it had to be.
With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers turned back into the hall.
But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house was lopsided … as bad, perhaps worse than before!
Gulping in fright, Mr. Chambers slammed the door shut, locked it and double bolted it. Then he went to his bedroom and took two sleeping powders.
His dreams that night were the same as on the night before. Again there was the islet in mid-ocean. Again he was alone upon it. Again the squirming hydrophinnae were eating his foothold piece by piece.
He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of early dawn filtered through the window. The clock on the bedside table showed . For a long time he lay there motionless.
Again the fantastic happenings of the night before came back to haunt him and as he lay there, staring at the windows, he remembered them, one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleep and astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled over them, lost the keen edge of fantastic terror that lurked around them.
The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.
There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple tree that grew close against the house.
But the tree was there … shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.
The tree was there now. But it hadn’t been when he first had looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.
And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor’s house … but those outlines were all wrong. They didn’t jibe and fit together … they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself when he thought of how it should look.
Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor’s house should look, it too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too weary to think about the house.
He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.
And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany bookcase that stood against the wall.
There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book that Mr. Chambers’ entire life was centered.
Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school.
It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as merely the vagaries of an overzealous mind.
Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of happier days swept over him.
Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so long ago the very words seemed strange and unreal:
Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical fate of this earth … yes, even the universe. Billions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets … and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were. … Destroy those minds and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power, will crumple and slip away like a column of sand. …
His eyes followed down the page:
Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself … but only with matter’s form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have moulded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter. What exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be destroyed, only altered or transformed.
But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we gain an insight into the possibility … yes probability … that there are other dimensions, other brackets of time and space impinging on the one we occupy.
If a pin is thrust into a shadow, would that shadow have any knowledge of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow is two dimensional, the pin three dimensional. Yet both occupy the same space.
Granting then that the power of men’s minds alone holds this universe, or at least this world in its present form, may we not go farther and envision other minds in some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter? Such a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis: that mind does control the formation of all matter; and that other worlds lie in juxtaposition with ours.
Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own.
He stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing into the fire upon the hearth.
He had written that. And because of those words he had been called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at the university, had been forced into this hermit life.
A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there now were one or two. A feeble force to hold the form of matter intact.
The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had blighted Africa, had reached South America … might even have come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the words of the men at the drugstore corner, the buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know the whole story … he could not know. He never listened to the radio, never read a newspaper.
But abruptly the whole thing fitted together in his brain like the missing piece of a puzzle into its slot. The significance of it all gripped him with damning clarity.
There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another dimension was fighting to supersede man’s control and take his universe into its own plane!
Abruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case and picked up his hat and coat.
He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him.
He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street. On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But there wasn’t any sun … only an all pervading grayness that shrouded everything … not a gray fog, but a gray emptiness that seemed devoid of life, of any movement.
The walk led to his gate and there it ended, but as he moved forward the sidewalk came into view and the house ahead loomed out of the gray, but a house with differences.
He moved forward rapidly. Visibility extended only a few feet and as he approached them the houses materialized like two dimensional pictures without perspective, like twisted cardboard soldiers lining up for review on a misty morning.
Once he stopped and looked back and saw that the grayness had closed in behind him. The houses were wiped out, the sidewalk faded into nothing.
He shouted, hoping to attract attention. But his voice frightened him. It seemed to ricochet up and into the higher levels of the sky, as if a giant door had been opened to a mighty room high above him.
He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and Lexington.
With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat bouncing on his head.
Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful that it still was there.
On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness appeared to thin … the enveloping curtain fell away, and he saw. …
Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.
And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was from that wall … from its crenelated parapets and battlements that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.
Thousands of eyes glaring down with but a single purpose.
And as he continued to look, something else seemed to take form above that wall. A design this time, that swirled and writhed in the ribbons of radiance and rapidly coalesced into strange geometric features, without definite line or detail. A colossal face, a face of indescribable power and evil, it was, staring down with malevolent composure.
Then the city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved in again.
Mr. Chambers pushed open the door of his house. But he did not lock it. There was no need of locks … not any more.
A few coals of fire still smouldered in the grate and going there, he stirred them up, raked away the ash, piled on more wood. The flames leaped merrily, dancing in the chimney’s throat.
Without removing his hat and coat, he sank exhausted in his favorite chair, closed his eyes then opened them again.
He sighed with relief as he saw the room was unchanged. Everything in its accustomed place: the clock, the lamp, the elephant ash tray, the marine print on the wall.
Everything was as it should be. The clock measured the silence with its measured ticking; it chimed abruptly and the vase sent up its usual sympathetic vibration.
This was his room, he thought. Rooms acquire the personality of the person who lives in them, become a part of him. This was his world, his own private world, and as such it would be the last to go.
But how long could he … his brain … maintain its existence?
Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little breath of reassurance returned to him. They couldn’t take this away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.
But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since he had first planned the house’s building, had lived here.
This room would stay. It must stay on … it must. …
He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume. His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.
For all the books weren’t there. A lot of books weren’t there! Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.
So the change already had started here! The unfamiliar books were gone and that fitted in the pattern … for it would be the least familiar things that would go first.
Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or did the lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away?
But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid, substantial thing.
For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly fingers. For he knew that this room no longer was proof against the thing that had happened out there on the street.
Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing children and barking dogs? Might not the Red Star confectionery still exist, splashing the street with the red of its neon sign?
Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended him to hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked by. They thought him mad. Could he be really mad?
But he knew he wasn’t mad. He knew that he perhaps was the sanest of all men who walked the earth. For he, and he alone, had foreseen this very thing. And the others had scoffed at him for it.
Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street. But it would be a different street. And the children undoubtedly would be different too.
For the matter of which the street and everything upon it had been formed would now be cast in a different mold, stolen by different minds in a different dimension.
Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own.
But there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scant years after he had written those prophetic words the thing was happening. Man had played unwittingly into the hands of those other minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war and war had bred a pestilence. And the whole vast cycle of events was but a detail of a cyclopean plan.
He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from that other dimension … or was it one supreme intelligence … had deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the world’s mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic premeditation.
On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a sob forced its way to his lips.
There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser had been there was greyish nothingness.
Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door. Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.
Nothing. …
Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.
“So here I am,” he said, half aloud.
So there he was. Embattled in the last corner of the world that was left to him.
Perhaps there were other men like him, he thought. Men who stood at bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from one dimension to another. Men who had lived close to the things they loved, who had endowed those things with such substantial form by power of mind alone that they now stood out alone against the power of some greater mind.
The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room still retained its form.
This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest of the room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair would remain. For this was the spot where he had lived for twenty years. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This room was for living. This was his last stand.
These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that had soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps.
He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors’ houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly spread; their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve.
Staring through the window, he saw it again. The same vision he had looked upon before and yet different in an indescribable way. There was the city illumined in the sky. There were the elliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes and battlements. He could see with stereoscopic clarity the aerial bridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude. The vision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion had changed … as if he were viewing it from two concentric angles at the same time.
And the face … the face of magnitude … of power of cosmic craft and evil. …
Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the room.
The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away and with them went one corner of the room.
And then the elephant ash tray.
“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chambers, “I never did like that very well.”
Now as he sat there it didn’t seem queer to be without the table or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal. Something one could expect to happen.
Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.
But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone, simply couldn’t do it.
He wondered what the elephant ash tray looked like in that other dimension. It certainly wouldn’t be an elephant ash tray nor would the radio be a radio, for perhaps they didn’t have ash trays or radios or elephants in the invading dimension.
He wondered, as a matter of fact, what he himself would look like when he finally slipped into the unknown. For he was matter, too, just as the ash tray and radio were matter.
He wondered if he would retain his individuality … if he still would be a person. Or would he merely be a thing?
There was one answer to all of that. He simply didn’t know.
Nothingness advanced upon him, ate its way across the room, stalking him as he sat in the chair underneath the lamp. And he waited for it.
The room, or what was left of it, plunged into dreadful silence.
Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny … the first time in twenty years.
He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.
The clock hadn’t stopped.
It wasn’t there.
There was a tingling sensation in his feet.
Message from Mars
I
“You’re crazy, man,” snapped Steven Alexander, “you can’t take off for Mars alone!”
Scott Nixon thumped the desk in sudden irritation.
“Why not?” he shouted. “One man can run a rocket. Jack Riley’s sick and there are no other pilots here. The rocket blasts in fifteen minutes and we can’t wait. This is the last chance. The only chance we’ll have for months.”
Jerry Palmer, sitting in front of the massive radio, reached for a bottle of Scotch and slopped a drink into the tumbler at his elbow.
“Hell, Doc,” he said, “let him go. It won’t make any difference. He won’t reach Mars. He’s just going out in space to die like all the rest of them.”
Alexander snapped savagely at him. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You drink too much.”
“Forget it, Doc,” said Scott. “He’s telling the truth. I won’t get to Mars, of course. You know what they’re saying down in the base camp, don’t you? About the bridge of bones. Walking to Mars over a bridge of bones.”
The old man stared at him. “You have lost faith? You don’t think you’ll go to Mars?”
Scott shook his head. “I haven’t lost my faith. Someone will get there … sometime. But it’s too soon yet. Look at that tablet, will you!”
He waved his hand at a bronze plate set into the wall.
“The roll of honor,” said Scott, bitterly. “Look at the names. You’ll have to buy another soon. There won’t be room enough.”
One Nixon already was on that scroll of bronze. Hugh Nixon, fifty-fourth from the top. And under that the name of Harry Decker, the man who had gone out with him.
The radio blurted suddenly at them, jabbering, squealing, howling in anguish.
Scott stiffened, ears tensed as the code sputtered across millions of miles. But it was the same old routine. The same old message, repeated over and over again … the same old warning hurled out from the ruddy planet.
“No. No. No come. Danger.”
Scott turned toward the window, started up into the sky at the crimson eye of Mars.
What was the use of keeping hope alive? Hope that Hugh might have reached Mars, that someday the Martian code would bring some word of him.
Hugh had died … like all the rest of them. Like those whose names were graven in the bronze there on the wall. The maw of space had swallowed him. He had flown into the face of silence and the silence was unbroken.
The door of the office creaked open, letting in a gust of chilly air. Jimmy Baldwin shut the door behind him and looked at them vacantly.
“Nice night to go to Mars,” he said.
“You shouldn’t be up here, Jimmy,” said Alexander gently. “You should be down at the base, tending to your flowers.”
“There’re lots of flowers on Mars,” said Jimmy. “Maybe someday I’ll go to Mars and see.”
“Wait until somebody else goes first,” said Palmer bitterly.
Jimmy turned about, hesitantly, like a man who had a purpose but had forgotten what it was. He moved slowly toward the door and opened it.
“I got to go,” he said.
The door closed heavily but the chill did not vanish from the room. For it wasn’t the chill of the mountain’s peak, but another kind of chill … a chill that had walked in with Jimmy Baldwin and now refused to leave.
Palmer tipped the bottle, sloshed the whiskey in the glass.
“The greatest pilot that ever lived,” he said. “Now look at him!”
“He still holds the record,” Alexander reminded the radio operator. “Eight times to the Moon and still alive.”
The accident had happened as Jimmy’s ship was approaching Earth on that eighth return trip. A tiny meteor had struck the hull, drilling a sharp-cut hole. It had struck Andy Mason, Jimmy’s best friend, squarely between the eyes.
The cabin had been filled with the scream of escaping air, had turned cold with the deadly breath of space and frost crystals had danced in front of Jimmy’s eyes.
Somehow Jimmy had patched the hole in the hull, had reached Earth in a smashing rocket drive, knowing he had little air, that every minute was a borrowed eternity.
Most pilots would have killed themselves or blown up their ships in that reckless race for Earth, but Jimmy, ace of all the spacemen of his day, had made it.
But he had walked from the ship with a blank face and babbling lips. He still lived at the rocket camp because it was home to him. He puttered among his flowers. He watched the rockets come and go without a flutter of expression. And everyone was kind to him, for in his face they read a fate that might be theirs.
“All of us are crazy,” said Scott. “Everyone of us. Myself included. That’s why I’m blasting off alone.”
“I refuse to let you go,” said Alexander firmly.
Scott rested his knuckles on the desk. “You can’t stop me. I have my orders to make the trip. Whether I go alone or with an assistant pilot makes no difference. That rocket blasts on time, and I’m in it when it goes.”
“But it’s foolishness,” protested Alexander. “You’ll go space-mad. Think of the loneliness!”
“Think of the coordinates,” snapped Scott. “Delay the blastoff and you have to work out a set of new ones. Days of work and then it’ll be too late. Mars will be too far away.”
Alexander spread his hands. “All right then. I hope you make it.”
Scott turned away but Alexander called him back.
“You’re sure of the routine?”
Scott nodded. He knew the routine by heart. So many hours out to the Moon, landing on the Moon to take on extra fuel, taking off for Mars at an exact angle at a certain minute.
“I’ll come out and see you off,” said Alexander. He heaved himself up and slid into a heavy coat.
Palmer shouted after Scott. “So long, big boy. It was nice knowing you.”
Scott shrugged. Palmer was a little drunk and very bitter. He’d watched them go too long. His nerves were wearing out.
Stars shone like hard, bright jewels in the African sky. A sharp wind blew over the summit of Mt. Kenya, a wind that whined among the icebound rocks and bit deep into the flesh. Far below blazed the lights of the base camp, hundreds of feet down the slope from the main rocket camp here atop the mountain set squarely on the Earth’s equator.
The rasping voice of a radio newscaster came from the open door of the machine shop.
“New York,” shrieked the announcer. “Austin Gordon, famous African explorer, announced this afternoon he will leave soon for the Congo valley, where he will investigate reports of a strange metallic city deep in the interior. Natives, bringing reports of the discovery out of the jungle, claim the city is inhabited by strange metallic insects.”
Someone slammed the door and the voice was cut off.
Scott hunched into the wind to light a cigarette.
“The explorers are going crazy, too,” he said.
Probably, later on in the program the announcer would have mentioned Scott Nixon and Jack Riley would blast off in a few minutes in another attempt to reach Mars. But it would be well along in the program and it wouldn’t take much time. Ten years ago Mars had been big news. Today it rated small heads in the press, slight mention on the air.
But the newscaster would have been wrong about Jack Riley. Jack Riley lay in the base camp hospital with an attack of ptomaine. Only an hour before Jack had clasped Scott’s hand and grinned at him and wished him luck.
He needed luck. For in this business a man didn’t have even an inside chance.
Scott walked toward the tilted rocket. He could hear the crunch of Alexander’s feet as the man moved with him.
“It won’t be new to you,” Alexander was saying, “you’ve been to the Moon before.”
Yes, he had been to the Moon three times and he was still alive. But, then, he had been lucky. Your luck just simply didn’t hold forever. There was too much to gamble on in space. Fuel, for one thing. Men had experimented with fuel for ten years now and still the only thing they had was a combination of liquid oxygen and gasoline. They had tried liquid hydrogen but that had proved too cold, too difficult to confine, treacherous to handle, too bulky because of its low density. Liquid oxygen could be put under pressure, condensed into little space. It was safe to handle, safe until it combined with gasoline and then it was sheer death to anything that got within its reach.
Of course, there had been some improvements. Better handling of the fuel, for instance. Combustion chambers stood up better now because they were designed better. Feed lines didn’t freeze so readily now as when the first coffins took to space. Rocket motors were more efficient, but still cranky.
But there were other things. Meteors, for one, and you couldn’t do much about them. Not until someone designed a screen, and no one had. Radiations were another. Space was full of radiations and, despite the insulating jacket of ozone some of them seeped through.
Scott climbed through the rocket valve and turned to close it. He hesitated for a moment, drinking in the smell and sight of Earth. There wasn’t much that one could see. The anxious face of Alexander, the huddled shadows that were watching men, the twinkling base camp lights.
With a curse at his own weakness, Scott slammed the valve lock, twirled it home.
Fitting himself into the shock absorbent chair, he fastened the straps that held him. His right foot reached out and found the trip that would fire the rockets. Then he lifted his wrist in front of his eyes and watched the second hand of the watch.
Ten seconds. Eight. Now five. The hand was creeping up, ticking off the time. It rested on the zero mark and he slammed down his foot. Cruel weight smashed down upon him, driving his body back into the padded chair. His lungs were flattened, the air driven from them. His heart thumped. Nausea seized him, and black mists swam before his eyes. He seemed to be slipping into a midnight chasm and he cried out weakly. His body went limp, sagging in the chair. Twin streams of blood trickled from his nose and down his lip.
He was far out in space when he struggled back to consciousness. For a time he did not stir. Lying in the chair, it took long minutes to realize where he was. Gradually his brain cleared and his eyes focused and made impressions on his senses. Slowly he became aware of the lighted instrument board, of the rectangle of quartz that formed the vision panel. His ears registered the silence that steeped the ship, the weird, deathly silence of outer space.
Weakly he stirred and sat upright, his eyes automatically studying the panel. The fuel pressure was all right, atmospheric pressure was holding, speed was satisfactory.
He leaned back in the chair and waited, resting, storing his strength. Automatically his hand reached up and wiped the blood from his lips and chin.
II
He was in space. Headed for the Moon and from there for Mars. But even the realization of this failed to rouse him from the lethargy of battered body and tortured brain.
Taking off in a rocket was punishment. Severe, terrible punishment. Only men who were perfect physical specimens could attempt it. An imperfect heart would simply stop under the jarring impact of the blastoff.
Some day rockets would be perfected. Some day rockets would rise gently from the Earth, shaking off Earth’s gravity by gradual application of power rather than by tremendous thrusts that kicked steel and glass and men out into space.
But not yet, not for many years. Perhaps not for many generations. For many years men would risk their lives in blasting projectiles that ripped loose from the Earth by the sheer savagery of exploding oxygen and gasoline.
A moan came from the rear of the ship, a stifled pitiful moan that brought Scott upright in the chair, tearing with nervous hands at the buckles of his belt.
With belt loosened, body tensed, he waited for a second, hardly believing he had heard the sound. It came again, a piteous human cry.
Scott leaped to his feet, staggered under the lack of gravitation. The rocket was coasting on momentum now and, while its forward motion gave it a simulation of gravity, enough so a man could orient himself, there was in actuality no positive gravity center in the shell.
A bundle of heavy blankets lay in a corner formed by a lashed down pile of boxes … and the bundle was moving feebly. With a cry in his throat, Scott leaped forward and tore the blankets aside. Under them lay a battered man, crumpled, with a pool of blood soaking into a blanket that lay beneath him. Scott lifted the body. The head flopped over and he stared down into the vacant, blood-streaked face of Jimmy Baldwin.
Jimmy’s eyes fluttered open, then closed again. Scott squatted on his heels, wild thoughts hammering in his head. Jimmy’s eyes opened again and regarded the pilot. He raised a feeble hand in greeting. The lips moved, but Jimmy’s voice was faint.
“Hello, Scott.”
“What are you doing here?” Scott demanded fiercely.
“I don’t know,” said Jimmy weakly. “I don’t know. I meant to do something, but I forgot.”
Scott rose and took a bottle of water from a case. Wetting his handkerchief, he bathed the bloodied face. His hands ran over Jimmy’s body but found no broken bones. It was a wonder the man hadn’t been killed outright. Some more Baldwin luck!
“Where are we, Scott?” Jimmy asked.
“We’re in space,” said Scott. “We’re going out to Mars.” No use of telling him anything but the truth.
“Space,” said Jimmy. “I use to go out in space. Then something happened.” He shook his head wearily. Mercifully, the memory of that something had been wiped from his brain.
Half dragging, half carrying, Scott got him to the assistant pilot’s seat, strapped him in, gave him a drink of water. Jimmy’s eyes closed and he sank back into the cushions. Scott resumed his chair, leaned forward to look out into space.
There was little to see. Space, viewed from any angle, unless one was near a large body, looked pretty much the same. The Moon was still out of his range of vision. It would be hours before it would move upward to intersect the path of the rocket’s flight.
Scott leaned back and looked at Jimmy. Apparently the man had sneaked aboard just before the takeoff. No one paid much attention to him. Everyone was kind to him and he was allowed to do as he pleased. For he was not insane. The tragedy of those few minutes years before had merely wiped out his memory, given him the outlook of a child.
Perhaps when he had gotten into the ship he had held some reason for his action, but now even that purpose had escaped him. Once again Jimmy Baldwin was a bewildered child’s brain in the body of a man.
“Anyway,” said Scott, half speaking to himself, half to the silent form, “you’re the first rocket stowaway.”
They would miss Jimmy back at the camp, would wonder what had happened to him. Perhaps they’d organize a posse and search for him. The possibility was they would never know what happened, for there was slight chance, Scott told himself, that he or Jimmy or the ship would ever get back to Earth again.
Someone else would have to tend Jimmy’s flowers now, but probably no one would, for his flowers were the Martian lilies. And Martian lilies no longer were a novelty.
It had been the lilies that started the whole thing, this crazy parade of men who went into space and died.
Slightly over twelve years ago, Dr. Steven Alexander reported that, from his observatory on Mt. Kenya, he had communicated with Mars by ultrashort wave radio. It had been a long and arduous process. First the signals from Earth, repeated in definite series, at definite intervals. And then, finally, the answer from the Red Planet. After months of labor slow understanding came.
“We send you,” signalled the Martians. “We send you.” Over and over again. A meaningless phrase. What were they sending? Slowly Alexander untangled the simple skein of thought. Mars finally messaged: “We send you token!” That word “token” had been hard. It represented thought, an abstract thought.
The world waited breathlessly for the token. Finally it came, a rocket winging its way across space, a rocket that flashed and glinted in the depth of space as it neared Earth. Kept informed of its location by the Martians, Earth’s telescopes watched it come. It landed near Mt. Kenya, a roaring, screaming streak of light that flashed across the midnight sky.
Dug up, it yielded an inner container, well-insulated against heat and cold, against radiation and shock. Opened, it was found to contain seeds. Planted, jealously guarded, carefully tended, the seeds grew, were the Martian lilies. They multiplied rapidly, spread quickly over the Earth.
Back on Earth today the Martian lilies grew in every hamlet, clogged the fence rows of every farm. Relieved of whatever natural enemies and checks they might have had on their native planet, they flourished and spread, became a weed that every farmer cursed wholeheartedly.
Their root structure probed deep into the soil. Drought could not kill them. They grew rapidly, springing to full growth almost overnight. They went to unkillable seed. Which was what might have been expected of any plant nurtured on the stubborn soil of Mars. Earth, to the Martian lilies, was a paradise of air and water and sunlight.
And, as if that first token-load had not been enough, the Martians kept on sending rocket loads of seeds. At each opposition the rockets came, each announced by the messages from the Martian transmitter. And each of them landed almost precisely on the spot where the first had landed.
That took mathematics! Mathematics and a superb knowledge of rocketry. The rockets apparently were automatic. There was no intelligence to guide them once they were shot into space. Their courses must have been plotted to the finest detail, with every factor determined in advance. For the Martian rockets were not aimed at Earth as one broad target but at a certain spot on Earth and so far every one of them had hit that mark!
At the rocket camp each Martian rocket was waited anxiously, with the hope it would bring some new payload. But the rockets never brought anything but seeds … more Martian lily seeds.
Jimmy stirred restlessly, opened his eyes and looked out the vision plate. But there was no terror in his eyes, no surprise nor regret.
“Space?” he asked.
Scott nodded.
“We’re going to the Moon?”
“To the Moon first,” said Scott. “From there we go to Mars.”
Jimmy lapsed into silence. There was no change upon his face. There never was any change upon his face.
I hope he doesn’t make any trouble, Scott told himself. It was bad enough just to have him along. Bad enough to have this added responsibility.
For space flight was a dangerous job. Ever since the International Mars Communication Center had been formed, with Alexander in charge, space had flung men aside. Ship after ship, pilot after pilot. The task, alone, of reaching the Moon had taken terrible toll.
Men had died. Some had died before they reached the Moon, some had died on the Moon but mostly they had died heading back for Earth. For landing on Earth, jockeying a rocket through Earth’s dense atmosphere, is a tricky job. Others had died enroute to Mars, ships flaring in space or simply disappearing, going on and on, never coming back. That was the way it had been with Hugh.
And now his brother, Scott, was following the trail that Hugh had blazed, the trail to the Moon and out beyond. Following in a bomb of potential death, with a blank-faced stowaway in the chair beside him.
Halfway to Mars and the ship was still intact. Running true to course, running on schedule, flashing through space under the thrust of momentum built up during the blast-out from the Moon.
Halfway to Mars and still alive! But too early yet to hope. Perhaps other men had gotten as far as this and then something had happened.
Scott watched the depths of space, the leering, jeering emptiness of star-studded velvet that stretched on and on.
There had been days of waiting and of watching. More days of waiting and of watching loomed ahead.
Waiting for that warning flicker on the instrument panel, that split second warning before red ruin struck as cranky fuel went haywire.
Waiting for the “tick” of a tiny meteor against the ship’s steel wall … the tiny, ringing sound that would be the prelude to disaster.
Waiting for something else … for that unknown factor of accident that would spatter the ship and the two men in it through many empty miles.
Endless hours of watching and of waiting, hastily snatched catnaps in the chair, hastily snatched meals. Listening to the babbling Jimmy Baldwin who wondered how his flowers were getting on, speculated on what the boys were doing back in the rocket camp on Earth.
One thing hammered at Scott Nixon’s brain … the message of the Martian radio, the message that had been coming now for many years. “No. No. No come. Danger.” Always that and little else. No explanation of what the danger was. No suggestion for circumventing or correcting that danger. No helpfulness in Earthmen’s struggle to cross the miles of space between two neighboring planets.
Almost as if the Martians didn’t want Earthmen to come. Almost as if they were trying to discourage space travel. But that would hardly be the case, for the Martians had readily cooperated in establishing communications, had exhibited real intelligence and earnestness in working out the code that flashed words and thoughts across millions of miles.
Without a doubt, had they wished, the Martians could have helped. For it was with seemingly little effort that they sent their own rockets to earth.
And why had each Martian rocket carried the same load each time? Could there be some significance in those Martian lily seeds? Some hidden meaning the Earth had failed to grasp? Some meaning that the things from Mars hoped would be read with each new rocket-load?
Why hadn’t the Martians come themselves? If they could shoot automatic rockets across the miles of space, certainly they could navigate rockets carrying themselves.
The Martian rockets had been closely studied back on Earth but had yielded no secrets. The fuel always was exhausted. More than likely the Martians knew, to the last drop, how much was needed. The construction was not unlike Earth rockets, but fashioned of a steel that was hardened and toughened beyond anything Earth could produce.
So for ten years Earthmen had worked unaided to cross the bridge of space, launching ships from the Earth’s most favored takeoff point, from the top of Mt. Kenya, heading out eastward into space, taking advantage of the mountain’s three mile height, the Earth’s rotation speed of 500 yards per second at the equator.
Scott reviewed his flight, checked the clocklike routine he had followed. Blastoff from Earth. Landing in the drear, desolate Mare Serenitatis on the Moon, refueling the ship from the buried storage tanks, using the caterpillar tractor from the underground garage to haul the rocket onto the great turntable cradle. Setting the cradle at the correct angle and direction, blasting off again at the precise second, carrying a full load of fuel, something impossible to do and still take off from Earth. Taking advantage of the Moon’s lower gravity, its lack of atmosphere. Using the Moon as a stepping stone to outer space.
Now he was headed for Mars. If he landed there safely, he could spend two days, no more, no less, before he blasted off for Earth again.
But probably he wouldn’t reach Mars. Probably he and Jimmy Baldwin, in the end, would be just a few more bones to pave the road to Mars.
III
A gigantic building, rising to several hundred feet in height, domed, without door or window, stood lonely in the vastness of the red plain that stretched to the far-off black horizon.
The building and nothing more. No other single sign of habitation. No other evidence of intelligent life.
The Martian lilies were everywhere, great fields of them, bright scarlet against the redness of the sand. But in its native soil the Martian lily was a sorry thing, a poor apology for the kind of flower that grew on Earth. Stunted, low-growing, with smaller and less brilliant flowers.
The sand gritted under Scott’s boots as he took a slow step forward.
So this was Mars! Here, at the North pole … the single building … the only evidence of intelligence on the entire planet. As the ship had circled the planet, cutting down its tremendous speed, he had studied the surface in the telescopic glass and this building had been the only habitation he had seen.
It stood there, made of shimmering metal, glinting in the pale sunlight.
“Bugs,” said Jimmy, at Scott’s elbow.
“What do you mean, bugs?” asked Scott.
“Bugs in the air,” said Jimmy. “Flying bugs.”
Scott saw them then. Things that looked like streaks of light in the feeble sunshine. Swarms of them hovered about the great building and others darted busily about.
“Bees,” suggested Jimmy.
But Scott shook his head. They weren’t bees. They glinted and flashed when the sun’s light struck them and they seemed more mechanical than lifelike.
“Where are the Martians?” Jimmy demanded.
“I don’t know, Jimmy,” declared Scott. “Damned if I do.”
He had envisioned the first Earthmen reaching Mars as receiving thunderous ovation, a mighty welcome from the Martians. But there weren’t any Martians. Nothing stirred except the shining bugs and the lilies that nodded in a thin, cold breeze.
There was no sound, no movement. Like a quiet summer afternoon back on Earth, with a veil of quietness drawn over the flaming desert and the shimmering building.
He took another step, walking toward the great building. The sand grated protestingly beneath his boot-heels.
Slowly he approached the building, alert, watching, ready for some evidence that he and Jimmy had been seen. But no sign came. The bugs droned overhead, the lilies nodded sleepily. That was all.
Scott looked at the thermometer strapped to the wrist of his oxygen suit. The needle registered 10 above, Centigrade. Warm enough, but the suits were necessary, for the air was far too thin for human consumption.
Deep shadow lay at the base of the building and as he neared it, Scott made out something that gleamed whitely in the shadow. Something that struck a chord of remembrance in his brain, something he had seen back on Earth.
As he hurried forward he saw it was a cross. A white cross thrust into the sand.
With a cry he broke into a run.
Before the cross he dropped to his knees and read the crudely carved inscription on the wood. Just two words. The name of a man, carven with a jackknife:
Harry Decker
Harry Decker! Scott felt his brain swimming crazily.
Harry Decker here! Harry Decker under the red sand of Mars! But that couldn’t be. Harry Decker’s name couldn’t be here. It was back on Earth, graven on that scroll of bronze. Graven there directly beneath the name of Hugh Nixon.
He staggered to his feet and stood swaying for a moment.
From somewhere far away he heard a shout and swinging around, ran toward the corner of the building.
Rounding it, he stopped in amazement.
There, in the shelter of the building, lay a rusted space ship and running across the sand toward him was a spacesuited figure, a figure that yelled as it ran and carried a bag over its shoulder, the bag bouncing at every leap.
“Hugh!” yelled Scott.
And the grotesque figure bellowed back.
“Scott, you old devil! I knew you’d do it! I knew it was you the minute I heard the rocket blasts!”
“It’s nice and warm here now,” said Hugh, “but you’d ought to spend a winter here. An Arctic blizzard is a gentle breeze compared with the Martian pole in winter time. You don’t see the Sun for almost ten months and the mercury goes down to 100 below, Centigrade. Hoar frost piles up three and four feet thick and a man can’t stir out of the ship.”
He gestured at the bag.
“I was getting ready for another winter. Just like a squirrel. My supplies got low before this spring and I had to find something to store up against another season. I found a half dozen different kinds of bulbs and roots and some berries. I’ve been gathering them all summer, storing them away.”
“But the Martians?” protested Scott. “Wouldn’t the Martians help you?”
His brother looked at him curiously.
“The Martians?” he asked.
“Yes, the Martians.”
“Scott,” Hugh said, “I haven’t found the Martians.”
Scott stared at him. “Let’s get this straight now. You mean you don’t know who the Martians are?”
Hugh nodded. “That’s exactly it. I tried to find them hard enough. I did all sorts of screwy things to contact that intelligence which talked with the Earth and sent the rockets full of seed, but I’ve gotten exactly nowhere. I’ve finally given up.”
“Those bugs,” suggested Scott. “The shining bugs.”
Hugh shook his head. “No soap. I got the same idea and managed to bat down a couple of them. But they’re mechanical. That’s all. Just machines. Operated by radium.
“It almost drove me nuts at first. Those bugs flying around and the building standing there and the Martian lilies all around, but no signs of any intelligence. I tried to get into the building but there aren’t any doors or windows. Just little holes the bugs fly in and out of.
“I couldn’t understand a thing. Nothing seemed right. No purpose to any of it. No apparent reason. Only one thing I could understand. Over on the other side of the building I found the cradle that is used to shoot the rockets to Earth. I’ve watched that done.”
“But what happened?” asked Scott. “Why didn’t you come back? What happened to the ship?”
“We had no fuel,” said Hugh.
Scott nodded his head.
“A meteor in space.”
“Not that,” Hugh told him, “Harry simply turned the petcocks, let our gasoline run into the sand.”
“Good Lord! Was he crazy?”
“That’s exactly what he was,” Hugh declared. “Batty as a bedbug. Touch of space madness. I felt sorry for him. He cowered like a mad animal, beaten by the sense of loneliness and space. He was afraid of shadows. He got so he didn’t act like a man. I was glad for him when he died.”
“But even a crazy man would want to get back to Earth!” protested Scott.
“It wasn’t Harry,” Hugh explained. “It was the Martians, I am sure. Whatever or wherever they are, they probably have intelligences greater than ours. It would be no feat for them, perhaps, to gain control of the brain of a demented man. They might not be able to dominate us, but a man whose thought processes were all tangled up by space madness would be an easy mark for them. They could make him do and think whatever they wanted him to think or do. It wasn’t Harry who opened those petcocks, Scott. It was the Martians.”
He leaned against the pitted side of the ship and stared up at the massive building.
“I was plenty sore at him when I caught him at it,” he said. “I gave him one hell of a beating. I’ve always been sorry for that.”
“What finally happened to him?” asked Scott.
“He ran out of the airlock without his suit,” Hugh explained. “It took me half an hour to run him down and bring him back. He took pneumonia. You have to be careful here. Exposure to the Martian atmosphere plays hell with a man’s lung tissues. You can breathe it all right … might even be able to live in it for a few hours, but it’s deadly just the same.”
“Well, it’s all over now,” declared Scott. “We’ll get my ship squared around and we’ll blast off for Earth. We made it here and we can make it back. And you’ll be the first man who ever set his foot on Mars.”
Hugh grinned. “That will be something, won’t it, Scott? But somehow I’m not satisfied. I haven’t accomplished a thing. I haven’t even found the Martians. I know they’re here. An intelligance that’s at least capable of thinking along parallel lines with us although its thought processes may not be parallel with ours.”
“We’ll talk it over later,” said Scott. “After we get a cup of coffee into you. I bet you haven’t had one in weeks.”
“Weeks,” jeered Hugh. “Man, it’s been ten months.”
“Okay, then,” said Scott. “Let’s round up Jimmy. He must be around here somewhere. I don’t like to let him get out of my sight too much.”
The silence of the dreaming red deserts was shattered by a smashing report that drummed with a mighty clap against the sky above. A gush of red flame spouted over the domed top of the mighty building and metal shards hammered spitefully against the sides, setting up a metallic undertone to the ear-shattering explosion.
Sick with dread, Scott plunged to the corner of the building and felt the sick dread deepen.
Where his space ship had lain a mighty hole was blasted in the sand. The ship was gone. No part of it was left. It had been torn into tiny fragments and hurled across the desert. Wisps of smoke crept slowly from the pit in the sand, twisting in the air currents that still swirled from the blast.
Scott knew what had happened. There was no need to guess. Only one thing could have happened. The liquid oxygen had united with the gasoline, making an explosive that was sheer death itself. A single tremor, a thrown stone, a vibration … anything would set it off.
Across the space between himself and the ship came the tattered figure of a man. A man whose clothes were torn. A man covered with blood, weaving, head down, feet dragging.
“Jimmy!” yelled Scott.
He sprinted forward but before he could reach his side, Jimmy had collapsed.
Kneeling beside him, Scott lifted the man’s head.
The eyes rolled open and the lips twitched. Slow, tortured words oozed out.
“I’m sorry … Scott. I don’t know why. …”
The eyes closed but opened again, a faint flutter, and more words bubbled from the bloody lips.
“I wonder why I did it!”
Scott looked up and saw his brother standing in front of him.
Hugh nodded. “The Martians again, Scott. They could use Jimmy’s mind. They could get hold of him. That blasted brain of his. …”
Scott looked down at the man in his arms. The head had fallen back, the eyes were staring, blood was dripping on the sand.
“Hugh,” he whispered, “Jimmy’s dead.”
Hugh stared across the sand at the little glimmer of white in the shadow of the building.
“We’ll make another cross,” he said.
IV
The Martians hadn’t wanted them to to come. That much, at least, was clear. But having gotten here, the Martians had no intention of letting them return to Earth again. They didn’t want them to carry back the word that it was possible to navigate across space to the outer planet.
Maybe the Martians were committed to a policy of isolation. Maybe there was a “Hands Off” sign set up on Mars. Maybe a “No trespassing” sign.
But if that had been the case, why had the Martians answered the radio calls from Earth? Why had they cooperated with Dr. Alexander in working out the code that made communication possible? And why did they continue sending messages and rockets to the Earth? Why didn’t they sever diplomatic relationship entirely, retire into their isolation?
If they didn’t want Earthmen to come to Mars why hadn’t they trained guns on the two ships as they came down to the scarlet sand, wiped them out without compunction? Why did they resort to the expedient of forcing Earthmen to bring about their own destruction? And why, now that Harry Decker and Jimmy Baldwin were dead, didn’t the Martians wipe out the remaining two of the unwanted race?
Perhaps the Martians were merely efficient, not vindictive. Maybe they realized that the remaining two Earthmen constituted no menace? And maybe, on the other hand, the Martians had no weapons. Perhaps they never had held a need for weapons. It might be they had never had to fight for self preservation.
And above and beyond all … what and where were the Martians? In that huge building? Invisible? In caverns beneath the surface? At some point far away?
Maybe … perhaps … why? Speculation and wonderment.
But there was no answer. Not even the slightest hint. Just the building shimmering in the unsetting Sun, the metallic bugs buzzing in the air, the lilies nodding in the breeze that blew across the desert.
Scott Nixon reached the rim of the plateau and lowered the bag of roots from his shoulder, resting and waiting for Hugh to toil up the remaining few yards of the slope.
Before him, slightly over four miles across the plain, loomed the Martian building. Squatting at its base was the battered, pitted space ship. There was too much ozone in the atmosphere here for the steel in the ship to stand up. Before many years had passed it would fall to pieces, would rust away. But that made little difference, for by that time they probably wouldn’t need it. By that time another ship would have arrived or they would be dead.
Scott grinned grimly. A hard way to look at things. But the only way. One had to be realistic here. Hardheaded planning was the only thing that would carry them through. The food supply was short and while they’d probably be able to gather enough for the coming winter, there was always the possibility that the next season would find them short.
But there was hope to cling to. Always hope. Hope that the summer would bring another ship winging out of space … that this time, armed by past experience, they could prevent its destruction.
Hugh came up with Scott, slid the bag of roots to the ground and sat upon it.
He nodded at the building across the desert.
“That’s the nerve center of the whole business,” he declared. “If we could get into it. …” His voice trailed away.
“But we can’t,” Scott reminded him. “We’ve tried and we can’t. There are no doors. No openings. Just those little holes the bugs fly in and out of.”
“There’s a door somewhere,” said Hugh. “A hidden door. The bugs use it to bring out machines to do the work when they shoot a rocket out for Earth. I’ve seen the machines. Screwy looking things. Work units pure and simple but so efficient you’d swear they possessed intelligence. I’ve tried to find the door but I never could and the bugs always waited until I wasn’t around before they moved the machines in or out of the building.”
He chuckled, scrubbing his bearded face with a horny hand.
“That rocket business saved my life,” he said. “If the power lead running out of the building to the cradle hadn’t been there I’d been sunk. But there it was, full of good, old electricity. So I just tapped the thing and that gave me plenty of power … power for heat, for electrolysis, for atmospheric condensation.”
Scott sank down heavily on his sack.
“It’s enough to drive a man nuts,” he declared. “We can reach out and touch the building with our hand. Just a few feet away from the explanation of all this screwiness. Inside that building we’d find things we’d be able to use. Machines, tools. …”
Hugh hummed under his breath.
“Maybe,” he said, “maybe not. Maybe we couldn’t recognize the machines, fathom the tools. Mechanical and technical development here probably wasn’t any more parallel to ours than intelligence development.”
“There’s the rocket cradle,” retorted Scott. “Same principle as we use on Earth. And they must have a radio in there. And a telescope. We’d be able to figure them out. Might even be able to send Doc Alexander a message.”
“Yeah,” agreed Hugh, “I thought of that, too. But we can’t get in the building and that settles it.”
“The bugs get under my skin,” Scott complained. “Always buzzing around. Always busy. But busy at what? Like a bunch of hornets.”
“They’re the straw bosses of the outfit,” declared Hugh. “Carrying out the orders of the Martians. The Martians’ hands and eyes you might say.”
He dug at the sand with the toe of his space boot.
“Another swarm of them took off just before we started out on this trip,” he said. “While you were in the ship. I watched them until they disappeared. Straight up and out until you couldn’t see them. Just like they were taking off for space.”
He kicked savagely at the sand.
“I sure as hell would like to know where they go,” he said.
“There’ve been quite a few of them leaving lately,” said Scott. “As if the building were a hive and they were new swarms of bees. Maybe they’re going out to start new living centers. Maybe they’re going to build more buildings. …”
He stopped and stared straight ahead of him, his eyes unseeing. Going out to start new living centers! Going out to build new buildings! Shining metallic buildings!
Like a cold wind from the past it came to him, a picture of that last night on Earth. He heard the whining wind on Mt. Kenya once again, the blaring of the radio from the machine shop door, the voice of the newscaster.
The memory shook him from head to foot, left him cold and shivery with his knowledge.
“Hugh!” he croaked. “Hugh, I know what it’s all about!”
His brother stared at him: “Take it easy, kid. Don’t let it get you. Stick with me, kid. We’re going to make it all right.”
“But, Hugh,” Scott yelled, “there’s nothing wrong with me. Don’t you see, I know the answer to all this Martian business now. The lilies are the Martians! Those bugs are migrating to Earth. They’re machines. Don’t you see … they could cross space and the lilies would be there to direct them.”
He jumped to his feet.
“They’re already building cities in the Congo!” he yelled. “Lord knows how many other places. They’re taking over the Earth! The Martians are invading the Earth, but Earth doesn’t know it!”
“Hold on,” Hugh yelled back at him. “How could flowers build cities?”
“They can’t,” said Scott breathlessly. “But the bugs can. Back on Earth they are wondering why the Martians don’t use their rockets to come to Earth. And that’s exactly what the Martians are doing. Those rockets full of seeds aren’t tokens at all. They’re colonization parties!”
“Wait a minute. Slow down,” Hugh pleaded. “Tell me this. If the lilies are the Martians and they sent seeds to Earth twelve years ago, why hadn’t they sent them before?”
“Because before that it would have been useless,” Scott told him. “They had to have someone to open the rockets and plant the seeds for them. We did that. They tricked us into it.
“They may have sent rockets of seeds before but if they did, nothing came of it. For the seeds would have been useless if they weren’t taken from the rocket. The rocket probably would have weathered away in time, releasing the seeds but by that time the seeds would have lost their germinating power.”
Hugh shook his head.
“It seems impossible,” he declared. “Impossible that plants could have real intelligence … that flowers could hold the mastery of a planet. I’m ready to accept almost any theory but that one. …”
“Your mind sticks on parallel evolution,” Scott argued. “There’s no premise for it. On Earth animals took the spotlight, pushing the plants into a subordinate position. Animals got the head start, jumped the gun on the plants. But there’s absolutely no reason why plants should not develop along precisely the same lines here that animals developed on Earth.”
“But the Martian lily lives only one season … ten months … and then it dies,” Hugh protested. “The next season’s growth comes from seed. How could plants build intelligence? Each new crop would have to start all over again.”
“Not necessarily,” declared Scott. “Animals are born with instinct, which is nothing more or less than inherited intelligence. In mankind there are strange evidences of racial memory. Why couldn’t the plants do the same thing with their seed … progress even a step further? Why couldn’t the seed carry, along with its other attributes, all the intelligence and knowledge of the preceding generation? That way the new plant wouldn’t have to start from scratch, but would start with all the accumulated knowledge of its immediate ancestor … and would add to that knowledge and pass the sum total on to the generation that was to follow.”
Hugh kicked absentmindedly at the sand.
“There would be advantages in that sort of development,” he agreed. “It might even be the logical course of survival on a planet like Mars. Some old Martian race, for all we know, might deliberately have shaped their development toward a plant existence when they realized the conditions toward which the planet was headed.”
“A plant society would be a strange one,” said Scott. “A sort of totalitarian society. Not the kind of a society animals would build … for an animal is an individual and a plant is not. In a plant race individuality would count for nothing, the race would count for everything. The driving force would be the preservation and advancement of the race as a whole. That would make a difference.”
Hugh glanced up sharply.
“You’re damned right that would make a difference,” he said. “They would be a deadly race. Once they got started, nothing could stop that singleness of purpose.”
His face seemed to blanch under the tan.
“Do you realize what’s happening?” he shouted. “For millions of years these plants have fought for bare existence on Mars. Every ounce of their effort has been toward race preservation. Every fall the bugs carefully gather all the seeds and carry them inside the building, bring them out and plant them in the spring. If it hadn’t been for some arrangement like that they probably would have died out years ago. Only a few scattered patches of them left now. …”
“But on Earth. …” said Scott.
And the two of them, white-faced, stared at one another. On Earth the Martian lilies would not have to carry on a desperate fight for their very existence. On Earth they had plenty of water, plenty of sunlight, plenty of good, rich soil. On Earth they grew larger and stronger and straighter. Under such conditions what would be the limit of their alien powers?
With the lilies multiplying each year, growing in every fence row, every garden, crowding out the farmers’ crops, lining every stream, clogging every forest … with swarm after swarm of the metallic bugs driving out into space, heading for the Earth … what would happen?
How long would the lilies wait? How would they attack? Would they simply crowd out every other living thing, conquering by a sort of population pressure? Or would they develop more fully those powers of forcing animal minds to do their bidding? Or did they have, perhaps, even stronger weapons?
“Hugh,” Scott rasped, “we have to warn Earth. Somehow we have to let them know.”
“Yes,” Hugh agreed, “but how?”
Together, limned against the harsh horizon, they stood, looking across the desert toward the Martian building.
Tiny figures, dimmed by distance, scurried about the building.
Scott squinted his eyes against the desert glare.
“What are those?” he asked.
Hugh seemed to jerk out of a trance.
“The machines again,” he said wearily. “They’re getting ready to shoot another rocket out to Earth. It’ll be the last one of the season. Earth is drawing away again.”
“More seeds,” said Scott.
Hugh nodded. “More seeds. And more bugs going out. And the worst of it is that Earth doesn’t know. No man in his right mind on Earth could even dimly speculate upon the possibility of high intelligence in plant life. There’s no reason to. No precedent upon which to base such a speculation. Earth plants have never had intelligence.”
“A message is all we need,” declared Scott. “Just get word to the Earth. They’d root up every plant on the face of the entire globe. They’d. …”
He stopped abruptly and stared out across the desert.
“The rocket,” he whispered. “The rocket is going to Earth!”
Hugh swung on him fiercely.
“What are you. …”
“We could send a message by the rocket!” yelled Scott. “They always watch for them … always hoping each one will carry something new. Some new thing from Mars. It’s the only way we can get a message back to Earth.”
“But they won’t let us near,” protested Hugh. “I’ve tried to get up close to the cradle when they were launching one and those machines always drove me away. Didn’t hurt me … but threatened.”
“We have guns,” said Scott.
“Guns,” said Hugh, “wouldn’t be worth a damn against them. The bullets would just glance off. Even explosive bullets wouldn’t harm them.”
“Sledges then,” said Scott. “We’ll make junk out of the damn things. We’ve got a couple of sledges in the ship.”
Hugh looked at him levelly.
“Okay, kid, let’s get going.”
V
The machines paid them no attention. No higher than a man’s waist, they curiously resembled grotesque spiders. Gangling rods and arms sprouted out all over them and from their trunks sprouted waving, steel antennae.
Overhead hung a swarm of the metallic bugs evidently directing the work of making the rocket ready.
“It takes just three minutes or thereabouts from the time they finally have her ready until she blasts,” said Hugh. “Whatever we are going to do has to be done in those three minutes. And we’ve got to hold them off until the rocket blasts. They’ll suspect there’s something wrong and will try to stop it but if we can hold them off. …”
“They must already have radioed Earth the rocket is coming,” said Scott. “We always got word days in advance. Probably they won’t follow up with their location messages but Doc will be watching for it anyhow.”
They stood tensed, waiting, each grasping a heavy hammer.
The space about the cradle was a scene of intense, but efficient activity. Last minute adjustments were made. Readings and settings were checked. Each machine seemed to act by rote, while overhead hung the cloud of humming bugs.
“We know what we’re to do,” said Hugh. “We’ve simply got to do it.”
Scott nodded.
Hugh shot a glance at him.
“Think you can hold them off, kid? It’ll take a while to unscrew the inner and outer caps and we have got to get that message inside the inner container or it’ll burn when the rocket hits atmosphere.”
“You just get that message in and the caps back on,” said Scott. “I’ll hold them off for you.”
Suddenly the machines scurried back from the cradle leaving a clear space of several yards around it.
“Now!” Hugh shouted and the two men charged.
The attack was a surprise. Their rush carried the line of machines between them and the cradle.
One machine barred Scott’s way and he smashed at it savagely with the heavy hammer. The blow flung it aside, crippled, dented, half-smashed.
Hugh was already at the cradle, clambering up the superstructure.
A machine rushed at Scott, steel arms flailing. Ducking a murderous swipe, the Earthman brought his sledge into play. It sheared through the arms, smashed into the body of the machine. The stricken mechanism seemed to reel, staggered erratically, then collapsed upon the sand.
In two leaps Scott gained the superstructure, scaled it and straddled the cradle. His sledge smashed savagely upon a climbing mechanism, flung it to the ground. But others were swarming up the steel lattice work. Tentacles snaked out, seeking to entrap him. A wicked blow on the leg almost brought him down.
His sledge worked steadily and at the foot of the cradle broken mechanisms bore testimony to its execution.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Hugh had inserted the envelope carrying the message in the inner container with the seeds, was tightening the screwcap. All that remained was to screw on the larger, heavier outer cap.
But only seconds must remain, precious seconds before the rocket blasted. And before that happened they had to be away from the cradle, for the backlash of flames would burn them to a cinder.
Scott felt perspiration streaming over his body, running off his eyelids, blearing his sight, trickling down his nose. He heard the rasp of metal as Hugh drove home the cap with savage thrusts of the wrench.
A machine rushed up the lattice at him and he smashed at it with unreasoning fury. The head of the sledge bit deep into the metal body.
A tentacle wrapped about his leg and jerked. He felt himself losing his balance, tumbling off the cradle into the melee of threshing metal things beneath him.
Then he was on the ground, buffeted and pounded by the maddened metal creatures. He fought savagely, blindly staggering forward. The shatterproof glass in his vision plate had been “broken,” its texture smashed into a million tiny crisscross lines, until it was like frosted glass.
He heard the tough fabric of his suit rip with a screeching sound. The bugs still were hammering against him.
The thin, acrid atmosphere of Mars burned into his nose and his lungs labored.
Unseeingly, he swung his sledge in swathlike circles. Shrieking like a wild Indian, he felt it smash and slam into the bodies of his metallic opponents.
Then the world was blotted out by a resounding roar, a Niagara of sound that beat in waves against one’s body.
That was the rocket leaving.
“Hugh!” he yelled insanely. “Hugh, we did it!”
The attack had fallen away and he stood unsteadily on his feet, panting, stiff from punishment, but filled with exultation.
They had won. He and Hugh had sent the message. Earth would be warned and Mars would lose its hope of conquering a new and younger world. Whatever dreams of conquest this old red planet may have nurtured would never come to be.
He put his hands up and ripped the helmet from his head, flinging it on the ground.
The metallic machines were ringed around him, motionless, almost as if they were looking at him. Almost as if they were waiting for his next move.
Wildly he whooped at them. “Start something, damn you! Just start something!”
But the line in front of him parted and he saw the blackened thing that lay upon the sand. The twisted, blasted, crumpled thing that huddled there.
Scott dropped his sledge and a sob rose in his throat. His hands clenched at his side and he tottered slowly forward.
He stood above the body of his brother, flung there on the sand by the searing backlash of the rocket blast.
“Hugh!” he cried, “Hugh!”
But the blackened bundle didn’t stir. Hugh Nixon was dead.
Eyes bleared, Scott stared around at the machines. They were breaking up, scattering, moving away.
“Damn you,” he screamed, “don’t you even care?”
But even as he spoke, he knew they didn’t care. The plant civilization of Mars was an unemotional society. It knew no love, no triumph, no defeat, no revenge. It was mechanistic, cold, logical. It did only those things which aimed at a definite end. So long as there was a chance of protecting the rocket, so long as there was hope of halting its flight after it had been tampered with, that civilization would act. But now that it was in space, now that it could not be recalled, the incident was over. There would be no further action.
Scott looked down at the man at his feet.
Harry Decker and Jimmy Baldwin and now Hugh Nixon. Three men had died here on Mars. He was the only one left. And he probably would die, too, for no man could for long breathe that Martian air and live.
What was it Hugh had said that first day?
“It plays hell with the tissues of your lungs.”
He stared around him, saw the interminable red deserts and the scarlet patches of Martian lilies, nodding in the breeze. Saw the humming bugs flashing in the pale sunlight. Saw the shimmer of the mighty building that had no doors or windows.
His lungs were aching now and his throat was raw. It was harder and harder to breathe.
He knelt in the sand and lifted the blackened body. Cradling it in his arms, he staggered along.
“I have to make another cross,” he said.
Far overhead, in the depths of space, twinkled the blue planet whose life would never know the slavery of the emotionless race of a dying world.
Mr. Meek—Musketeer
I
Now that he’d done it, Oliver Meek found the thing he’d done hard to explain.
Under the calm, inquiring eyes of Mr. Richard Belmont, president of Lunar Exports, Inc., he stammered a little before he could get started.
“For years,” he finally said, “I’ve been planning a trip. …”
“But, Oliver,” said Belmont, “we would give you a leave of absence. You’ll be back. There’s no reason to resign.”
Oliver Meek shuffled his feet and looked uncomfortable, a little guilty.
“Maybe I won’t be back,” he declared. “You see, it isn’t just an ordinary trip. It may take a long, long time. Something might happen. I’m going out to see the Solar System.”
Belmont laughed lightly, reared back in his chair, matching fingertips. “Oh, yes. One of the tours. Nothing dangerous about them. Nothing at all. You needn’t worry about that. I went on one a couple of years ago. Mighty interesting. …”
“Not one of the tours,” interrupted Meek. “Not for me. I have a ship of my own.”
Belmont thumped forward in his chair, looking almost startled.
“A ship of your own!”
“Yes, sir,” Oliver admitted, squirming uncomfortably. “Over thirty years I’ve saved for it … for it and the other things I’ll need. It sort of got to be … well, an obsession, you might say.”
“I see,” said Belmont. “You planned it.”
“Yes, sir, I planned it.”
Which was a masterpiece of understatement.
For Belmont could not know and Oliver Meek, stoop-shouldered, white-haired bookkeeper, could not tell of those thirty years of thrift and dreams. Thirty years of watching ships of the void taking off from the space port, just outside the window where he sat hunched over ledgers and calculators. Thirty years of catching scraps of talk from the men who ran those ships. Men and ships with the alien dust of far off planets still clinging to their skins. Ships with strange marks and scars upon them, and men with strange words upon their tongues.
Thirty years of reducing high adventure to cold figures. Thirty years of recording strange cargoes and stranger tales into accounts. Thirty years of watching through a window while rockets, outbound, dug molten pits into the field. Thirty years of being on the edge, the very fringe of life … but never in it.
Nor could Belmont have guessed or Meek formed in words the romanticism that glowed within the middle-aged bookkeeper’s heart … a thing that sometimes hurt … something earthbound that forever cried for space.
Nor the night classes Oliver Meek had attended to learn the theory of space navigation and after that more classes to gain an understanding of the motors and controls that drove the ships between the planets.
Nor how he had stood before the mirror in his room hour after hour, practicing, perfecting the art of pistol handling. Nor of the afternoons he had spent at the shooting gallery.
Nor of the nights he had read avidly, soaking up the lore and information and color of those other worlds that seemed to beckon him.
“How old are you, Oliver?” asked Belmont.
“Fifty next month, sir,” Meek answered.
“I wish you were taking one of the passenger ships,” said Belmont. “Now, one of those tours aren’t so bad. They’re comfortable and …”
Meek shook his head and there was a stubborn glint in the weak blue eyes behind the thick lensed glasses.
“No tour for me, sir. I’m going to some of those places the tours never take you. I’ve missed a lot in these thirty years. I’ve waited a long time and now I’m going out and see the things I’ve dreamed about.”
Oliver Meek pushed open the swinging doors of the Silver Moon and stepped timidly inside. Just through the door he stopped and stared, for the place hit him squarely in the face … the acrid smoke of Venusian leaf, the high-pitched laughter of the Martian dancing girls, the soft whirr of wheels, the click of balls as they bounced around the spinning wheels, the clatter of poker chips, the odor of strange liquors, the chirping and growling of a dozen tongues, the strange, exotic music of Ganymede.
Meek blinked through his heavy lenses, moved forward cautiously.
In the far corner of the place stood a table occupied by one man … an old, grizzled veteran of the Asteroids with his muzzle in a flagon of cheap beer.
Meek sidled toward the table, drew out a chair.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked and Old Stiffy Grant choked on a mouthful of beer in his amazement.
“Go ahead, stranger,” he finally croaked. “I don’t give a dang. I don’t own the joint.”
Meek sat down on the edge of the chair. His eyes swept the room. He smelled the smoke, the raw liquor, the sweat-stained clothing of the men, the cheap perfumery of the dancing girls.
He shifted his gun belt so the two energy pistols hung more easily, and cautiously slid farther back upon the chair.
So this was Asteroid City on Juno. The place he’d read about. The place the pulp paper writers used as background for their more lurid tales. This was the place where guns flamed and men were found dead in the streets and a girl or a game of chance or just one spoken word could start a fight.
The tours didn’t include places such as this. They took one to the nice, civilized places … towns like Gusta Pahn on Mars and Radium City on Venus and out to Satellite City on Ganymede. Civilized, polished places … places hardly different than New York or Chicago or Denver back home. But this was different … here one could sense something that made the blood run faster, made a thrill scamper up one’s spine.
“You’re new here, ain’t you?” asked Stiffy.
Meek jumped, then recovered his composure.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. I always wanted to see this place. I read about it.”
“Ever read about an Asteroid Prowler?” asked Stiffy.
“I believe I have somewhere. In a magazine section. A crazy story. …”
“It ain’t crazy,” protested Stiffy. “I saw one of them … this afternoon. Right here on Juno. None of these dad-blamed fools will believe me.”
Furtively, Meek studied the man opposite him. He didn’t seem to be such a bad fellow. Almost like any other human being. A little rough, maybe, but a good fellow just the same.
“Say,” he suggested impulsively, “maybe you’d have a drink with me.”
“You’re dang tootin’,” agreed Stiffy. “I never turn down no drinks.”
“You order it,” said Meek.
Stiffy bawled across the room. “Hey, Joe, bring us a couple snorts.”
“What kind of an animal was this you were speaking of?” asked Meek.
“Asteroid Prowler,” said Stiffy. “Most of these hoodlums don’t think there is one, but I know different. I saw him this afternoon and he was the dad-blamest thing I ever laid my eyes on. He boiled right out from behind a big rock and started coming after me. I let him have one in the face but that didn’t even nick him. Full-power, too. When that happened I didn’t waste no more time. I took it on the lam. Got to my ship and got out of there.”
“What did he look like?”
Stiffy leaned across the table and wagged a forefinger solemnly. “Mister, you won’t believe me when I tell you. But it’s the truth, so help me. He had a beak. And eyes. Danged if them eyes weren’t something. Like they were reaching out and trying to grab you. Not really reaching out, you know. But there was something in them that tried to talk to you. Big as plates and they shimmered like there was fire inside of them.
“These dod-rotted rock-blasters here laughed at me when I told them about it. Insinuated I held the truth lightly, they did. Laughed their fool heads off.
“It’s pretty near as big as a house … that animal, and it’s got a body like a barrel. It’s got a long neck and a little head with big teeth. It’s got a tail, too, and it’s kind of set close to the ground. You see, I was out looking for the Lost Mine.”
“Lost Mine?”
“Sure, ain’t you ever heard of the Lost Mine?”
Stiffy blew beer in amazement.
Oliver Meek shook his head, feeling that probably he was the victim of tales reserved for the greenest of the tenderfeet, not knowing what he could do about it if he were.
Stiffy settled more solidly in his chair.
“The Lost Mine story,” he declared, “has been going around for years. Seems a couple of fellows found it a few years after the first dome was built. They came in and told about it, stocked up with grub and went out. They never did come back.”
He leaned across the table.
“You know what I think?” he demanded gustily.
“No,” said Meek. “What do you think?”
“The Prowler got ’em,” Stiffy said, triumphantly.
“But how could there be a lost mine?” asked Meek. “Asteroid City was one of the first mining domes built out here. There was no prospecting done until about that time.”
Stiffy shook his head, waggling his beard.
“How should I know,” he defended himself. “Maybe some early space traveler set down here, dug a mine, never got back to Earth to tell about it.”
“But Juno is only one hundred and eighteen miles in diameter,” Meek argued. “If there had been a mine someone would have found it.”
Stiffy snorted. “That’s all you know about it, stranger. Only one hundred and eighteen miles, sure … but one hundred and eighteen miles of the worst danged country man ever set a boot on. Mostly up and down.”
The drinks came, the bartender slapping them down on the table before them. Meek gasped first at their price, then choked on the drink itself. But he smothered the choke manfully and asked:
“What kind of stuff is this?”
“Bocca,” replied Stiffy. “Good old Martian bocca. Puts hair on your chest.”
He gulped his drink with gusto, blew noisily through his whiskers, eyed Meek disapprovingly.
“Don’t you like it?” he demanded.
“Sure,” lied Meek. “Sure I like it.”
He shut his eyes and poured the liquor into his mouth, gulped fiercely, desperately, almost strangling.
Said Stiffy: “Tell you what let’s do. Let’s get into a game.”
Meek opened his mouth to accept the invitation, then closed it, caution stealing over him. After all, he didn’t know much about this place. Maybe he’d better go a little easy, at least at first.
He shook his head. “No, I’m not very good at cards. Just a few games of penny-ante now and then.”
Stiffy looked his disbelief. “Penny ante,” he said, then guffawed as if he sensed humor in what Meek had said. “Say, you’re good,” he roared. “Don’t s’pose you can use them lightnin’ throwers of yours either.”
“Some,” admitted Meek. “Practiced in front of a looking glass a little.”
He wondered why Stiffy rolled in his chair with mirth until tears ran down into his whiskers.
Stiffy held a full house … aces with kings … and his eyes had the look of a cat stalking a saucer full of cream.
There were only two in the game, Stiffy and an oily gentleman called Luke. As the stakes mounted and the game grew hotter the others at the table dropped out.
Standing behind Stiffy, Oliver Meek watched in awe, scarcely breathing.
Here was life … the kind of life one would never dream of back in the little cubby hole with its calculators and dusty books at Lunar Exports, Inc.
In the space of an hour, he had seen more money pass across the table than he had ever owned in all his life. Pots that climbed and pyramided, fortunes gambled on the flip of a single card.
But there was something else too … something wrong about the dealing. He couldn’t figure quite what it was, but he had read an article about how gamblers dealt the cards when they didn’t aim to give the other fellow quite an even break. And there had been something about Luke’s dealing … something that he had read about in that article.
Across the table Luke grimaced.
“I’ll have to call you,” he announced. “I’m afraid you’re too strong for me.”
Stiffy slapped down his hand triumphantly.
“Match that, dang you!” he exulted. “The kind of cards I been waiting for all night.”
He reached out a gnarled hand to rake in the coins but Luke stopped him with a gesture.
“Sorry,” he said.
He flipped the cards down slowly, one at a time. First a trey, then a four and then three more fours.
Stiffy gulped, reached for the bottle.
But even as he did, Oliver Meek reached out and placed his hand upon the money on the table, fingers wide spread. He’d remembered what he had read in that article. …
“Just a minute, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ve remembered something. …”
Silence thudded in the room.
Meek looked across the table straight into the eyes of Luke.
Luke said: “You better explain yourself, mister.”
Meek suddenly was flustered. “Why, maybe I acted too hastily. It really was nothing. I just noticed something about the deal. …”
Luke jerked erect, kicking his chair away with the single motion of rising. The crowd suddenly surged away, out of the line of fire. The bartender ducked behind the bar. Stiffy flung himself with a howl out of his chair, skidded along the floor.
Meek, suddenly straightening from the table, saw Luke’s hand streaking for the gun at his belt and in a split second he realized that here he faced a situation that demanded action.
He didn’t think about those days of practice in front of the mirror. He didn’t call upon a single iota of the gun-lore he had read in hundreds of books. His mind, for a bare instant, was almost a blank, but he acted as if by instinct.
His hands moved like driving pistons, snapped the twin guns from their holsters, heaved them clear of leather, grabbed them in midair.
He saw Luke’s gun muzzle swinging up, tilted down the muzzle of his own left gun, pressed the activator. There was a screeching hiss, a streak of blue that crackled in the air and the gun that Luke held in his hand was suddenly red hot.
But Meek wasn’t watching Luke. His eyes were for the crowd and even as he pressed the firing button he saw a hand pick a bottle off the bar, lift it to throw. The gun in his right hand shrieked and the bottle smashed into a million pieces, the liquor turned to steam.
Slowly Meek backed away, his tread almost catlike, his weak blue eyes like cold ice behind the thick-lensed spectacles, his hunched shoulders still hunched, his lean jaw like a steel trap.
He felt the wall at his back and stopped.
Out in the room before him no one stirred. Luke stood like a statue, gripping his right hand, badly burned by the smoking gun that lay at his feet. Luke’s face was a mask of hatred.
The rest of them simply stared. Stared at this outlander. A man who wore clothing such as the Asteroid Belt had never seen before. A man who looked as if he might be a clerk or even a retired farmer out on a holiday. A man with glasses and hunched shoulders and a skin that had never known the touch of sun in space.
And yet a man who had given Luke Blaine a head start for his gun, had beaten him to the draw, had burned the gun out of his hand.
Oliver Meek heard himself speaking, but he couldn’t believe it was himself. It was as if some other person had taken command of his tongue, was forcing it to speak. He hardly recognized his voice, for it was hard and brittle and sounded far away.
It was saying: “Does anyone else want to argue with me?”
It was immediately apparent no one did.
II
Oliver Meek tried to explain it carefully, but it was hard when people were so insistent. Hard, too, to collect his thoughts so early in the day.
He sat on the edge of the bed, white hair tousled, his night shirt wrinkled, his bony legs sticking out beneath it.
“But I’m not a gun fighter,” he declared. “I’m just on a holiday. I never shot at a man before in all my life. I can’t imagine what came over me.”
The Rev. Harold Brown brushed his argument aside.
“Don’t you see, sir,” he insisted, “what you can do for us? These hoodlums will respect you. You can clean up the town for us. Blacky Hoffman and his mob run the place. They make decent government and decent living impossible. They levy protection tribute on every businessman, they rob and cheat the miners and prospectors who come here, they maintain vice conditions. …”
“All you have to do,” said Andrew Smith brightly, “is run Blacky and his gang out of town.”
“But,” protested Meek, “you don’t understand.”
“Five years ago,” the Rev. Brown went on, disregarding him, “I would have hesitated to pit force against force. It is not my way nor the way of the church … but for five years I’ve tried to bring the gospel to this place, have worked for better conditions and each year I see them steadily getting worse.”
“This could be a swell place,” enthused Smith, “if we could get rid of the undesirables. Fine opportunities. Capital would come in. Decent people could settle. We could have some civic improvements. Maybe a Rotary club.”
Meek wiggled his toes despairingly.
“You would earn the eternal gratitude of Asteroid City,” urged the Rev. Brown. “We’ve tried it before but it never worked.”
“They always killed our man,” Smith explained, “or he got scared, or they bought him off.”
“We never had a man like you before,” the Rev. Brown declared. “Luke Blaine is a notorious gunman. No one, ever before, has been able to beat him to. …”
“There must be some mistake,” insisted Meek. “I’m just a bookkeeper. I don’t know a thing. …”
“We’d swear you in as marshal,” said Smith. “The office is vacant now. Has been for three months or more. We can’t find anyone to take it.”
“But I’m not staying long,” protested Meek. “I’m leaving pretty soon. I just want to try to get a look at the Asteroid Prowler and scout around to see if I can’t find some old rocks I read about once.”
The two visitors stared open mouthed at him. Meek brightened. “You’ve heard about those old rocks, maybe. Some funny inscriptions on them. Fellow who found them thought they had been made recently, probably just before Earthmen first came here. But no one can read them. Maybe some other race … from somewhere far away.”
“But it won’t take you long,” pleaded Smith. “We got warrants for all of them. All you got to do is serve them.”
“Look,” said Meek in desperation, “you have got me wrong. It must have been an accident, shooting that gun out of Mr. Blaine’s hand.”
Meek felt dull anger stirring within him. What right did these people have of insisting that he help them with their troubles? What did they think he was? A desperado or space runner? Another gangster? Just because he’d been lucky at the Silver Moon.
“By gosh,” he declared flatly, “I just won’t do it!”
They looked pained, rose reluctantly.
“I suppose we shouldn’t have expected that you would,” said the Reverend Brown bitingly.
The Silver Moon was quiet. The bartender was languidly wiping the top of the bar. A Venusian boy was as languidly sweeping out. The dancing girls were gone, the music was silent.
Stiffy and Oliver Meek were among the few customers.
Stiffy gulped a drink and blew fiercely through his whiskers.
“Oliver,” he said, “you sure are a ring-tailed bearcat with them guns of yours. I wonder, would you tell me how you do it?”
“Look here, Mr. Grant,” said Meek. “I wish you’d quit talking about what I did. It was just an accident, anyhow. What I’m mainly interested in is this Asteroid Prowler you were telling me about. Is there any chance I might find him if I went out and looked?”
Stiffy choked, almost purple with astonishment.
“Good gravy,” he said, “now you want to go out and tangle with the Prowler!”
“Not tangle with him,” Meek declared. “Just look at him.”
“Mister,” Stiffy warned, “the best way to look at that thing is with a telescope. A good, powerful telescope.”
The swinging doors swung open and a man walked in.
The newcomer walked directly toward the table occupied by Stiffy and Meek. He halted beside it, black beard jutting fearsomely, eyes bleakly cold.
“I’m Blacky Hoffman,” he said. “I suppose you’re Meek.” He disregarded Stiffy.
Meek stood up and held out his hand.
“Glad to know you, Mr. Hoffman,” he said.
Blacky took the proffered hand in some surprise.
“Seems I should know you, Meek, but I don’t. Should have heard of you at some time or other. A man like you would get talked about.”
Meek shook his head. “I don’t think you ever have. I never did anything to get talked about.”
“Sit down,” said Hoffman and it sounded like a command.
“I got to be going,” Stiffy piped, already halfway to the door.
Hoffman poured out a drink and shoved the bottle at Meek. Meek gritted his teeth and poured a short one.
“No use beating around the bush,” said Blacky. “We may as well get down to cases. I guess we understand one another.”
Oliver Meek didn’t know what the other meant, but he had to say something.
“I guess we do,” he agreed.
“All right, then,” said Hoffman. “I’ve built up a sweet little racket here and I don’t like fellows butting in.”
Meek essayed to down his liquor, succeeded, gasped for breath.
“But I could use a man like you,” said Hoffman. “Luke tells me you are handy with the blasters.”
“I practice sometimes,” Meek admitted.
A smile twitched Hoffman’s bearded lips. “We have the town just where we want it. The officials can’t do a thing. Scared to. Marshals always eat rock or skip town. Maybe you would like to throw in with us. Not much to do, easy pickings.”
“I’m sorry,” said Meek, “but I can’t do that.”
“Listen, Meek,” warned Hoffman, “you’re either with us or you aren’t. We don’t like chiselers here. We know what to do with guys who try to muscle in. I don’t know who you are or where you come from, but I’m telling you this … straight. If you don’t come in, all right … but if you stick around after tonight I can’t promise you protection.”
Meek was silent, mulling the threat.
“You mean,” he finally asked, “that you’re ordering me out if I don’t join your gang?”
Hoffman nodded. “That, big boy, is just exactly what I mean.”
Slow anger and resentment ate at Meek. Who was this Hoffman to order him out of Asteroid City? This was a free Solar System, wasn’t it? No wonder the Rev. Brown was jittery. No wonder the decent people wanted a cleanup.
Meek’s anger mounted, a cold deadly anger that shook him like a frigid hand. An anger that almost frightened him, for very seldom in his life had he been really angry.
He rose slowly from the table, hitched his gun belt to a comfortable position.
“The town’s been without a marshal for a long time, hasn’t it?” he asked.
Hoffman’s laugh boomed out. “You bet it has. And it’s going to stay that way. The last one took it on the lam. The one before that got killed. The one before that sort of disappeared. …”
Meek spoke slowly, weak eyes burning.
“Horrible condition,” he said. “Something’s got to be done about it.”
The streets were deserted, quiet, a deadly quiet that lurked and hovered, waiting for something to happen.
Oliver Meek polished his marshal’s star with his coat sleeve, glanced up at the dome. Stars glittered, their light distorted by the heavy quartz. Stars in a dead black sky.
Bathed in the weak starlight, the mighty walls of the canyon reared above the dome. A canyon, the only sort of place where a city could rise on one of the planetoids. For the walls protected the dome against the deadly barrage of whizzing debris that continually shrieked down from space. Those mighty cragged mountains and dizzy cliffs were pocked with the blows dealt, through long eons, by that hail of armor-piercing projectiles.
Meek returned his gaze to the street, saw the lights of the Silver Moon. Nervously he felt of the papers in his inside pocket. Warrants for the arrest of John Hoffman for murder, Luke Blaine for murder, Jim Smithers for reckless shooting, Jake Loomis for assault and battery, Robert Blake for robbery.
And suddenly, Oliver Meek was afraid. For death waited him, he knew, inside the swinging doors of the Silver Moon. A death preluded by this quiet street.
Almost as if he were awaking from a dream, he found questions filling his brain. What was he doing here? Why had he gotten himself into a jam like this? What difference did it make to him what happened to Asteroid City?
It had been anger that had made him do it … that unaccountable anger which had flared when Hoffman told him to get out.
After all, what difference would a few days make? He was going to leave anyhow. He’d seen about all there was to see in Asteroid City. He wanted to see the Prowler and the stones with the strange inscriptions on them, but they were sights he could get along without.
If he turned around and walked the other way he could reach his space ship in just a few minutes. There was fuel enough to take him to Ganymede. No one would know until he was already gone. And after he was gone, what would he care what anybody thought?
He stood irresolutely, arguing with himself. Then he shook his head, resumed his march toward the Silver Moon.
A figure stepped from a dark doorway. Meek saw the threatening gleam of steel. His hands streaked toward his gun-butts, but something prodded him in the back and he froze, fingers touching metal.
“All right, marshal,” said a mocking voice. “You just turn around and walk the other way.”
He felt his guns lifted from their holsters and he turned around and walked. Footsteps crunched beside him and behind him, but otherwise he walked in silence.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked, his voice just a trifle shaky.
One of the men laughed.
“Just on a little trip, marshal. Out to take a look at Juno. It’s a right pretty sight at night.”
Juno wasn’t pretty. For the most part, there was little of it one could see. The stars shed little light and the depressions were in shadow, while the cragged mountain tops seemed like shimmering mirages in the ghostly starlight.
The ship lay on a plateau between a needle-like range and a deep, shadowed valley.
“Now, marshal,” said one of the men, “you stay right here. You’ll see the Sun come up over that mountain back there. Interesting. Dawn on Juno is something to remember.”
Meek started forward, but the other waved him back with his pistol.
“You’re leaving me here?” shrieked Meek.
“Why sure,” the man said. “You wanted to see the Solar System, didn’t you?”
They backed away from him, guns in hand. Frozen in terror, he watched them enter the ship, saw the port close. An instant later the ship roared away, the backwash of its tubes buffeting Meek to the ground.
He struggled to his feet, watching the blasting tubes until they were out of sight. Clumsily he stepped forward and then stopped. There was no place to go … nothing to do.
Loneliness and fear swept over him in terrible waves of anguish. Fear that dwarfed any emotion he had ever felt. Fear of the ghostly shimmer of the peaks, fear of the shadow-blackened valley, fear of space and the mad, cold intensity of unwinking stars.
He fought for a grip on himself. It was fear such as this that drove men mad in space. He’d read about that, heard about it. Fear of the loneliness and the terrible depths of space … fear of the indifference of endless miles of void, fear of the unknown that always lurked just at elbow distance.
“Meek,” he told himself, “you should have stayed at home.”
Dawn came shortly, but no such dawn as one would see on Earth. Just a gradual dimming of the stars, a gradual lifting of the blacker darkness as a larger star, the Sun, swung above the peaks.
The stars still shone, but a gray light filtered over the landscape, made the mountains solid things instead of ghostly shapes.
Jagged peaks loomed on one side of the plateau, fearsome depths on the other. A meteor thudded somewhere to his right and Meek shuddered. There was no sound of the impact but he could feel the vibrations of the blow as the whizzing mass struck the cliffs.
But it was foolish to be afraid of meteors, he told himself. He had greater and more immediate worries.
There were less than eight hours of air left in the tanks of his space suit. He had no idea where he was, although he knew that many miles of rugged, fearsome country stretched between him and Asteroid City.
The space suit carried no food and no water, but that was of minor moment, he realized, for his air would give out long before he felt the pangs of thirst or hunger.
He sat down on a massive boulder and tried to think. There wasn’t much to think about. Everywhere his thoughts met black walls. The situation, he told himself, was hopeless.
If only he hadn’t come to Asteroid City in the first place! Or having come, if he had only minded his business, this never would have happened. If he hadn’t been so anxious to show off what he knew about card dealing tricks. If only he hadn’t agreed to be sworn in as marshal. If he’d swallowed his pride and left when Hoffman told him to.
He brushed away such thoughts as futile, took stock of his surroundings.
The cliff on the right hand side was undercut, overhanging several hundred feet of level ground.
Ponderously, he heaved himself off the boulder, wandered aimlessly up the wider tongue of plateau. The undercut, he saw, grew deeper, forming a deep cleft, as if someone had furrowed out the mountain side. Heavy shadows clung within it.
Suddenly he stopped, riveted to the ground, scarcely daring to breathe.
Something was moving in the deep shadow of the undercut. Something that seemed to glint faintly with reflected light.
The thing lurched forward and, in the fleeting instant before he turned and ran, Oliver Meek had an impression of a barrel-like body, a long neck, a cruel mouth, monstrous eyes that glowed with hidden fires.
There was no speculation in Oliver Meek’s mind. From the description given him by Stiffy, from the very terror of the thing, he knew the being shambling toward him was the Asteroid Prowler.
With a shriek of pure fear, Meek turned and fled and behind him came the Prowler, its head swaying on the end of its whip-like neck.
Meek’s legs worked like pistons, his breath gasping in his throat, his body soaring through space as he covered long distances at each leap under the influence of lesser gravity.
Thunderous blasts hammered at the earphones in his helmet and as he ran he craned his head skyward.
Shooting down toward the plateau, forward rockets braking, was a small spaceship!
Hope rose within him and he glanced back over his shoulder. Hope died instantly. The Prowler was gaining on him, gaining fast.
Suddenly his legs gave out. Simply folded up, worn out with the punishment they had taken. He threw up his arms to shield his helmet plate and sobbed in panic.
The Asteroid Prowler would get him now. Sure as shooting. Just at the minute rescue came, the Prowler would get him.
But the Prowler didn’t get him. Nothing happened at all. Surprised, he sat up and spun around, crouching.
The ship had landed, almost at the edge of the plateau and a man was tumbling out of the port. The Prowler had changed his course, was galloping toward the ship.
The man from the ship ran in leaping bounds, a pistol in one gloved hand, and his yelp of terror rang in Meek’s earphones.
“Run, dang you. Run! That dad-blamed Prowler will be after us any minute now.”
“Stiffy,” yelled Meek. “Stiffy, you came out to get me.”
Stiffy landed beside him, hauled him to his feet.
“Dang right I came to get you,” he panted. “I thought them hoodlums would be up to some dirty tricks, so I stuck around and watched.”
He jerked at Meek’s arm.
“Come on, Oliver, we got to get along.”
But Meek jerked his arm away.
“Look what he’s doin!” he shouted. “Just look at him!”
The Prowler seemed to be bent on systematic destruction of the space ship. His jaws were ripping at the steel plating. … Ripping at it and tearing it away, peeling it off the frame as one might peel an orange.
“Hey,” howled Stiffy. “You can’t do that. Get out of there, you danged. …”
The Prowler turned to look at them, a heavy power cable in its mouth.
“You’ll be electrocuted,” yelped Stiffy. “Danged if it won’t serve you right.”
But, far from being electrocuted, the Prowler seemed to be enjoying himself. He sucked at the power cable and his eyes eyes glowed blissfully.
Stiffy flourished his pistol.
“Get away,” he yelled. “Get away or I’ll blister your danged hide.”
Almost playfully the Prowler minced away from the ship, feet dancing.
“He did it!” said Meek.
“Did what?” Stiffy scowled bewilderedly.
“Got away from that ship, just like you told him to.”
Stiffy snorted. “Don’t ever kid yourself he did it because I told him to. He couldn’t even hear me, probably. Living out here like this, he wouldn’t have anything to hear with. Probably he’s just trying to decide which one of us he’ll catch first. Better be ready to kick you up some dust.”
The Prowler trotted toward them, head bobbing up and down.
“Get going,” Stiffy yelled at Meek and brought up his pistol. A blue shaft of light whipped out, smacked the Prowler in the head, but the Prowler didn’t even falter in his stride. The energy charge seemed to have no power at all. It didn’t even spatter … it looked as if the blue pencil of raging death was boring straight into the spread of forehead between the monstrous eyes.
“Run, you danged fool,” Stiffy screeched at Meek. “I can’t hold him off.”
But Meek didn’t run … instead he sprang straight into the Prowler’s path, arm upraised.
“Stop!” he yelled.
III
The Prowler skidded to a stop, his metal hooves leaving scratches on the solid rock.
For a moment the three of them stood stock still, Stiffy’s jaw hanging in astonishment.
Meek reached out a hand and patted the Prowler’s massive shoulder.
“Good boy,” he said. “Good boy.”
“Come away from there!” Stiffy yelled in sudden terror. “Just one good gulp and that guy would have you.”
“Ah, shucks,” said Meek, “he won’t hurt anybody. He’s only hungry, that’s all.”
“That,” declared Stiffy, “is just what I’m afraid of.”
“You don’t understand,” insisted Meek. “He isn’t hungry for us. He’s starved for energy. Give him another shot from the gun.”
Stiffy stared at the gun hanging in his hand.
“You’re sure it wouldn’t make him sore?” he asked.
“Gosh, no,” said Meek. “That’s what he wants. He soaks it up. Didn’t you notice how the beam went right into him, without spattering or anything. And the way he sucked that power cable. He drained your ship of every drop of energy it had.”
“He did what?” yelped Stiffy.
“He drained the ship of energy. That’s what he lives on. That’s why he chased you. He wanted you to keep on shooting.”
Stiffy clapped a hand to his forehead.
“We’re sunk for certain, now,” he declared. “There might have been a chance to get back with just a few plates ripped off the ship. But with all the energy gone. …”
“Hey, Stiffy,” yelled Meek, “take a look at this.”
Stiffy moved nearer, cautiously.
“What you got now?” he demanded irritably.
“These marks on his shoulder,” said Meek. His gloved finger shook excitedly as he pointed. “They’re the same kind of marks as were on those stones I read about in the book. Marks no one could read. Fellow who wrote the book figured they were made by some other race that had visited Juno. Maybe a race from outside the Solar System, even.”
“Good gravy,” said Stiffy, in awe, “you don’t think. …”
“Sure, I do,” Meek declared with the air of a man who is sure of his knowledge. “A race came here one time and they had the Prowler along. For some reason they left him. Maybe he was just a robot and they didn’t have room for him, or maybe something happened to them. …”
“Say,” said Stiffy, “I bet you that’s just what he is. A robot. Attuned to thought waves. That’s why he minds you.”
“That’s what I figured,” Meek agreed. “Thought waves would be the same, no matter who thought them … human being or a … well … or something else.”
A sudden thought struck Stiffy. “Maybe them guys found the Lost Mine! By cracky, that would be something, wouldn’t it? Maybe this critter could lead us to it.”
“Maybe?” Meek said doubtfully.
Meek patted the Prowler’s rocky shoulder gently, filled with wonder. In some unguessed time, in some unknown sector of space, the Prowler had been fashioned by an alien people. For some reason they had made him, for some reason they had left him here. Abandonment or purpose?
Meek shook his head. That would be something to puzzle over later, something to roll around in his brain on some monotonous flight into the maw of space.
Space! Startled at the thought clanging on his brain he jerked a quick glance upward, saw the bleak stars staring at him. Eyes that seemed to be laughing at him, cruel, ironic laughter.
“Stiffy,” he whispered. “Stiffy, I just thought of something.”
“Yeah, what is it?”
Stark terror walked in Meek’s words. “My oxygen tank is better than half gone. And the ship is wrecked. …”
“Cripes,” said Stiffy, “I guess we just forgot. We sure are behind the eight ball. Somehow we got to get back to Asteroid City. And we got to get there quick.”
Meek’s eyes brightened. “Stiffy, maybe. … Maybe we could ride the Prowler.”
Stiffy backed away. But Meek reached out and grasped his arm. “Come on. It’s the only way, Stiffy. We have to get there and the Prowler can take us.”
“But … but … but. …” Stiffy stammered.
“Give me a leg up,” Meek ordered.
Stiffy complied and Meek leaped astride the broad metal back, reached down and hauled Stiffy aboard.
“Get going, you flea-bitten nag!” Meek yipped, in sudden elation.
There was reason for elation. Not until that moment had he stopped to consider the Prowler might object to being ridden. Might consider it an insult.
The Prowler apparently was astonished, but that was all. He shook his head in bewilderment and weaved his neck around as if he wasn’t quite sure just what to do. But at least he hadn’t started to take the place apart.
“Giddap!” yelled Stiffy, bringing the butt of his pistol down.
The Prowler jigged a little, then gathered himself together and started. The landscape blurred with speed as he leaped a mighty boulder, skipped along a narrow ledge around a slick-faced mountain, skidded a hairpin turn.
Meek and Stiffy fought desperately to hang on. The metal back was slick and broad and there weren’t any handholds. They bounced and thumped, almost fell off a dozen times.
“Stiffy,” yelled Meek, “how do we know he’s taking us to Asteroid City?”
“Don’t fret about that,” said Stiffy. “He knows where we want to go. He read our mind.”
“I hope so,” Meek said, prayerfully.
The Prowler whished around a right angle turn on a narrow ledge and the distant peaks wheeled sickeningly against the sky.
Meek lay flat on his belly and hugged the Prowler’s sides. The mountains whistled past. He stole a look at the jagged peaks on the near horizon and they looked like a tight board fence.
Oliver Meek fought manfully to get back his composure as the Prowler pranced down the main street of Asteroid City.
The sidewalks were lined with hundreds of staring faces, faces that drooped in astonishment and disbelief.
Stiffy was yelling at someone. “Now, doggone you, will you believe there is a Prowler?”
And the man he yelled at didn’t have a word to say, just stood and stared.
In the swarm of faces, Meek saw those of the Reverend Harold Brown and Andrew Smith and, almost as if in a dream, he waved jauntily to them. At least, he hoped the wave was jaunty. Wouldn’t do to let them know his knees were too weak to hold him up.
Smith waved back and shouted something, but the Reverend Brown’s jaw hung open and he seemed too wonder-struck to move.
This, thought Meek, is the kind of things you read about. The conquering hero coming home astride his mighty charger. Only the conquering hero, he remembered with a sudden twinge, usually was a young lad who sat straight in the saddle instead of an old man with shoulders hunched from thirty years of poring over dusty ledgers.
A man was stepping out into the street, a man who carried a gun in hand and suddenly Meek realized they were abreast of the Silver Moon.
The armed man was Blacky Hoffman.
Here, thought Meek, is where I get it. This is what I get for playing the big shot … for being a smart alec, for remembering how cards shouldn’t be dealt and for shooting a man’s gun out of his hand and letting myself be talked into being a marshal.
But he sat stiff and as straight as he could on the Prowler and kept his eyes on Hoffman. That was the only way to do. That was the way all the heroes did in the stories he had read. And doggone, he was a hero. Whether he liked it or not, he was one.
The street was hushed with sudden tension and the very air seemed to be crackling with the threat of direful happenings.
Hoffman’s voice rang crisply through the stillness.
“Go for your blasters, Meek!”
“I have no blasters,” Meek told him calmly. “Your hoodlums took them from me.”
“Borrow Stiffy’s,” snapped Hoffman, and added, with a nasty laugh: “You won’t need them long.”
Meek nodded, watching Hoffman narrowly. Slowly he reached back for Stiffy’s gun. He felt it in his hand, wrapped his fingers tightly around it.
Funny, he thought, how calm he was. Like he had been in the Silver Moon that night. There was something about a gun. It changed him, turned him into another man.
He didn’t have a chance, he knew. Hoffman would shoot before he could ever get the gun around. But despite that, he felt foolishly sure. …
Hoffman’s gun flashed in the weak sunlight, blooming with blue brilliance.
For an instant, a single fraction of a second, Meek saw the flash of the beam straight in his eyes, but even before he could involuntarily flinch, the beam had bent. True to its mark, it would have drilled Meek straight between the eyes … but it didn’t go straight to its mark. Instead, it bent and slapped itself straight between the Prowler’s eyes.
And the Prowler danced a little jig of happiness as the blue spear of energy knifed into its metal body.
“Cripes,” gasped Stiffy, “he draws it! He ain’t satisfied with just taking it when you give it to him. He reaches out and gets it. Just like a lightning rod reaching up and grabbing lightning.”
Puzzlement flashed across Hoffman’s face, then incredulity and finally something that came close to fear. The gun’s beam snapped off and his hands sagged. The gun dropped in the dust. The Prowler stood stock still.
“Well, Hoffman?” Meek asked quietly and his voice seemed to run all along the street.
Hoffman’s face twitched.
“Get down and fight like a man,” he rasped.
“No,” said Meek, “I won’t do that. Because it wouldn’t be man to man. It would be me against your entire gang.”
Hoffman started to back away, slowly, step by furtive step. Step by step the Prowler stalked him there in the silent street.
Then Hoffman, with a scream of terror, broke and ran.
“Get him!” Meek roared at the Prowler.
The Prowler, with one lightning lunge, one flip of its whip-like neck, got him. Got him, gently, as Meek had meant he should.
Howling in mingled rage and terror, Hoffman dangled by the seat of his pants from the Prowler’s beak. Neatly as any circus horse, the Prowler wheeled and trotted back to the Silver Moon, carrying Hoffman with a certain gentle grace that was not lost upon the crowd.
Hoffman quieted and the crowd’s jeers rang against the dome. The Prowler pranced a bit, jiggled Hoffman up and down.
Meek raised a hand for silence, spoke to Hoffman. “OK, Mr. Hoffman, call out your men. All of them. Out into the middle of the street. Where we can see them.”
Hoffman swore at him.
“Jiggle him some,” Meek told the Prowler. The Prowler jiggled him and Hoffman bawled and clawed at empty air.
“Damn you,” shrieked Hoffman, “get out into the street. All of you. Just like he said.”
No one stirred.
“Blaine,” yelled Hoffman. “Get out there! You, too Smithers. Loomis. Blake!”
They came slowly, shamefaced. At a command from Meek they unholstered their blasters and heaved them in a pile.
The Prowler deposited Hoffman with them.
Meek saw Andrew Smith standing at the edge of the sidewalk and nodded to him. “There you are, Mr. Smith. Rounded up, just like you wanted them.”
“Neat,” said Stiffy, “but not gaudy.”
Slowly, carefully, bones aching, Meek slid from the Prowler’s back, was surprised his legs would hold him up.
“Come in and have a drink,” yelled a dozen voices all at once.
“Bet your life,” agreed Stiffy, licking his chops.
Men were slapping Meek on the back, yelling at him. Yelling friendly things, calling him an old he-wolf.
He tried to thrust out his chest but didn’t succeed too well. He hoped they wouldn’t insist on his drinking of lot of bocca.
A hand tugged at Meek’s elbow. It was the Reverend Brown.
“You aren’t going to leave that beast out here all alone?” he asked. “No telling what he might do.”
“Ah, shucks,” protested Stiffy, “he’s gentle as a kitten. Stands without hitching.”
But even as he spoke, the Prowler lifted his head, almost as if he were sniffing, started down the street at a swinging trot.
“Hey,” yelled Stiffy, “come back here, you cross-eyed crow-bait!”
The Prowler didn’t falter in his stride. He went even faster.
Cold fear gripped Meek by the throat. He tried to speak and gulped instead. He’d just thought of something. The power plant that supplied Asteroid City with its power and light, the very oxygen it breathed, was down that way.
A power plant and an alien robot that was starved for energy!
“My stars!” gasped Meek.
He shook off the minister’s hand and galloped down the street, shrieking at the Prowler. But the Prowler had no thought of stopping.
Panting, Meek slowed from a gallop to a trot, then to a labored walk. Behind him, he heard Stiffy puffing along. Behind Stiffy trailed practically the entire population of Asteroid City.
Far ahead came the sound of rending steel and crashing structure as the Prowler ripped the plant apart to get at the juice.
Stiffy gained Meek’s side and panted at him. “Cripes, they’ll crucify us for this. We got to get him out of there.”
“How?” asked Meek.
“Danged if I know,” said Stiffy.
One side of the plant was a mass of tangled wreckage, surrounding a hole out of which protruded the Prowler’s hind quarters. Terrified workers and maintenance men were running for their lives. Live wires spat and crackled with flaming energy.
IV
Meek and Stiffy halted a half block away, breath whistling in their throats. The Prowler’s tail, protruding from the hole in the side of the plant, twitched happily. Meek regarded the scene with doleful thoughts.
“I wish,” Stiffy declared, “we’d stayed out there and died. It would have been easier than what’s liable to happen to us now.”
Feet thumped behind them and a hand grabbed Meek’s shoulder, grabbed it. It was Andrew Smith, a winded, apoplectic Andrew Smith.
“What are you going to do?” he shouted at Meek.
Meek swallowed hard, tried to make his voice even. “Just studying over the situation, Mr. Smith. I’ll figure out something in a minute.”
“Sure he will,” insisted Stiffy. “Leave him alone. Give him time. He always does what he says he’ll do. He said he’d round up Blacky for you, and he did. He went out single-handed and captured the Prowler. He …”
“Yeah,” yelled Smith, “and he said the Prowler would stand without hitching, too. And did he stand? I ask you …”
“He didn’t say that,” Stiffy interrupted, testily, “I said that.”
“It don’t make a bit of difference who said it,” shrieked Smith. “I got stock in that plant there. And the Prowler’s ruining it. He’s jeopardizing the life of this whole city. And it’s all your fault. You brought him here. I’ll sue you, the both of you, so help me. …”
“Ah, shut up,” snapped Stiffy. “Who can think with you blabbering around?”
Smith danced in rage. “Who’s blabbering? I got a good mind to. …”
He doubled up his fist and started toward Stiffy.
And once again Oliver Meek did something he never would have thought of doing back on Earth. He put out his gloved hand, deliberately, and pushed Smith in the face. Pushed hard, so hard that Smith thumped down in the dust of the street and sat there, silenced by surprise.
Without even looking back, Meek strode purposefully down the street toward the Prowler. What he meant to do he did not know. What he possibly could do he had no idea. But anything was better than standing there while the crowd screamed at him and men shook their fists at him.
Why, they might even lynch him! He shivered at the thought. But men still did things like that. Especially when someone monkeyed around with the very things they depended on for life out here in naked space. Maybe they’d turn him out on Juno with only an hour or two of oxygen. Maybe they’d. …
Stiffy was yelling at him. “Come back, you danged old fool. …”
Suddenly the ground leaped and bucked beneath Meek’s feet. The power plant reeled before his startled eyes and then, somehow, he was on his back, watching the dome wheel and weave above him.
Fighting for breath that had been knocked out of him, he clawed his way to his knees, tried to stand erect, but the ground still was crawling with motion.
It was like an earthquake, he told himself, startled that he could even think. But it couldn’t be an earthquake. Juno didn’t have earthquakes, there was no reason for Juno to have earthquakes. The little planetoid eons ago had cooled through and through, each rock, each strata had found its place. Juno was dead, dead as the reaches of space itself, and earthquakes don’t happen on dead planets.
Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the Prowler had backed out of the hole in the power plant, was standing with four legs spread wide, bracing himself. His long neck was stretched high in the air and the ugly, toothy head had the look of quick alertness.
Meek gained his feet, stood tottering, keeping upright by some fancy footwork. The Prowler started toward him, legs gathering speed, heading down the street.
With a hoarse whoop, Meek steadied himself, half crouched and held his breath, leaped, leaped so hard he almost vaulted over the beast’s broad back. Sprawling, he scrambled into position astride the running robot, saw Stiffy leaping at him. Quickly he shot out a hand, grasped Stiffy and hauled him aboard.
Ahead of them the crowd rushed for safety, leaving a broad avenue for the storming Prowler and his two riders.
“Get the locks open,” yelled Stiffy. “Here we come!”
The crowd took up the shriek. “Get the locks open!”
The Prowler swept down the street, hoofs clattering like hammer blows. Ahead of them the inner lock swung open. As the Prowler bulleted into the entrance tunnel, the outer lock swung out and for a few wild seconds air screamed and howled, rushing from the city into the vacuum of space.
In frantic haste, Meek and Stiffy worked with their helmets, getting them clamped down. Then they were out in the open, the gleaming city behind them.
Less than half a mile away loomed a massive boulder towering a hundred feet or more above the level of the canyon floor. The Prowler made a beeline for it.
“Oliver,” yelled Stiffy, “that thing wasn’t there before. Look, it almost blocks the canyon!”
The boulder was black but it crawled with a greenish glow, a faint network of somber fire.
The breath caught in Meek’s throat.
“Stiffy,” he whispered.
Behind him, Stiffy almost sobbed in excitement. “Yeah, I know. It’s a meteor. And it’s lousy with radium.”
“It just fell,” said Meek, voice unsteady. “That’s what shook up the place. Wonder is it didn’t crack the dome wide open.”
“We better jump for it,” urged Stiffy, “if we don’t want to get plumb burned. Can’t go near that thing without lead sheathing.”
Meek flung himself sidewise, throwing up his arms to shield his helmet, struck on his shoulders and rolled. Slowly, benumbed from the fall, he crept out of the shadow of a high rock wall into the starlight.
Stiffy was sitting on the ground, rubbing his shins.
“Barked them up some,” he admitted.
Up the valley the Prowler was arching its back and rubbing against the green-glowing boulder.
“Just like a dad-blamed cat that has found some catnip,” said Stiffy. “Must sort of like that radium.”
He rose slowly, dusted off his suit.
“Well,” he suggested, “let’s you and me go into action.”
“Action?”
“Sure. Let’s go back and file us a claim on that meteor. Don’t need to worry about anybody else jumping it, cause every dad-blamed one of them is scared speechless of the Prowler. They won’t go near the meteor long as he’s around.”
Meek stared at the meteor speculatively. “That’s worth a lot of money, isn’t it, Stiffy? Filled with radium like that.”
“Bet your boots,” said Stiffy cheerfully. “We go fifty-fifty on her. Split equal ways. We’re pardners.”
“Tell you what you do,” Meek said slowly. “You take it all. Just take out enough to fix up the damage back there and call that my share.”
Stiffy’s jaw drooped. “Say, what you getting at?”
“I’m leaving,” said Meek.
“Good gravy! Leaving! And just when we made us a strike.”
“You don’t understand,” said Meek. “I didn’t come out here to find radium. Or to arrest gangs. Or even to capture an Asteroid Prowler. I just came out to look around. Nice and quiet. Didn’t want to bother anybody. Didn’t want anybody to bother me.”
“Doggone it,” said Stiffy, “and I was just figuring maybe, soon as we cleaned up the radium, we might get that Prowler to lead us to the Lost Mine.”
Meek brightened. “I have a hunch I know where that Lost Mine is, Stiffy. Remember there was a cut-back in the cliff near where we found the Prowler. Well, when I first saw him, he was in that place. Got a hunch maybe that’s the mine.”
Stiffy grinned. “So you’re sticking with me.”
Meek shook his head. “No, I’m still leaving.”
“Just like that?” said Stiffy.
Stiffy held out his hand, “OK, if that’s what you want to do. I’ll bank your half in the First Martian back on Earth. Leave my address there. Might want to get in touch with me some time.”
Meek gripped his hand. “You don’t need to do that. Take all of it. Just see the plant’s fixed up.”
Stiffy’s eyes shone queerly, moistly in the starlight. “Shucks, there’s enough for both of us. More than enough.” His voice was rough. “Now get along with you.”
Meek started to walk away.
“Goodbye, Stiffy,” he called.
“So long,” Stiffy shouted.
Meek hesitated. It seemed there should have been more he could have said. Some way to let Stiffy know he liked him. Some way to tell him he was a friend in a life which had known few friends.
He tried to think of ways to put what he felt in words, but there wasn’t any way, none that didn’t sound awkward and sentimental.
He wheeled about, headed for the space port. His feet went faster and faster, until finally he was running.
He had to get out of here, he told himself, before he got into another jam. His luck was stretched too thin already. A fellow just couldn’t go on having luck like that.
And besides, there was all of space to roam in, other places to see. That was what he had set out to do. To see the Solar System in his own ship, to do all the things he’d dreamed about back in the cubby hole at Lunar Exports, Inc.
And he was going to do just that, he promised himself. Although he hoped the next stop would be more peaceable.
It added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:
We Fix Anything.
Mr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:
Ask About Educated Bugs.
A bit bewildered, but determined not to show it, Meek swung away from the signpost and gravely regarded the settlement. On the chart it was indicated by a fairly sizeable dot, but that was merely a matter of comparison. Out Saturn-way even the tiniest outpost assumes importance far beyond its size.
The slab of rock was no more than five miles across, perhaps even less. Here in its approximate center, were two buildings, both of almost identical construction, semi-spherical and metal. Out here, Meek realized, shelter was the thing. Architecture merely for architecture’s sake was still a long way off.
One of the buildings was the repair shop which the sign advertised. The other, according to the crudely painted legend smeared above its entrance lock, was the “Saturn Inn.”
The rest of the rock was landing field, pure and simple. Blasters had leveled off the humps and irregularities so spaceships could sit down.
Two ships now were on the field, pulled up close against the repair shop. One, Meek noticed, belonged to the Solar Health and Welfare Department, the other to the Galactic Pharmaceutical Corporation. The Galactic ship was a freighter, ponderous and slow. It was here, Meek knew, to take on a cargo of radiation moss. But the other was a puzzler. Meek wrinkled his brow and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what a welfare ship would be doing in this remote corner of the Solar System.
Slowly and carefully, Meek clumped toward the squat repair shop. Once or twice he stumbled, hoping fervently he wouldn’t get the feet of his cumbersome spacesuit all tangled up. The gravity was slight, next to nonexistent, and one who wasn’t used to it had to take things easy and remember where he was.
Behind him Saturn filled a tenth of the sky, a yellow, lemon-tinged ball, streaked here and there with faint crimson lines and blotched with angry, bright green patches.
To right and left glinted the whirling, twisting, tumbling rocks that made up the Inner Ring, while arcing above the horizon opposed to Saturn were the spangled glistening rainbows of the other rings.
“Like dewdrops in the black of space,” Meek mumbled to himself. But he immediately felt ashamed of himself for growing poetic. This sector of space, he knew, was not in the least poetic. It was hard and savage and as he thought about that, he hitched up his gun belt and struck out with a firmer tread that almost upset him. After that, he tried to think of nothing except keeping his two feet under him.
Reaching the repair shop’s entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. Swiftly the lock spun outward and a moment later Meek had passed through the entrance vault and stepped into the office.
A dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head.
Meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling Earth gravity under him again. He lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his shoulders.
“You are the gentleman who can fix things?” he asked the mechanic.
The mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no bewhiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek’s hair was white and stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale. His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose. Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and slight frame.
The mechanic said nothing.
Meek tried again. “I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So I. …”
The mechanic shook himself.
“Sure,” he agreed, still slightly dazed. “Sure I can fix you up. What you got?”
He swung his feet off the desk.
“I ran into a swarm of pebbles,” Meek confessed. “Not much more than dust, really, but the screen couldn’t stop it all.”
He fumbled his hands self-consciously. “Awkward of me,” he said.
“It happens to the best of them,” the mechanic consoled. “Saturn sweeps in clouds of the stuff. Thicker than hell when you reach the Rings. Lots of ships pull in with punctures. Won’t take no time.”
Meek cleared his throat uneasily. “I’m afraid it’s more than a puncture. A pebble got into the instruments. Washed out some of them.”
The mechanic clucked sympathetically. “You’re lucky. Tough job to bring in a ship without all the instruments. Must have a honey of a navigator.”
“I haven’t got a navigator,” Meek said, quietly.
The mechanic stared at him, eyes popping. “You mean you brought it in alone? No one with you?”
Meek gulped and nodded. “Dead reckoning,” he said.
The mechanic glowed with sudden admiration. “I don’t know who you are, mister,” he declared, “but whoever you are, you’re the best damn pilot that ever took to space.”
“Really I’m not,” said Meek. “I haven’t done much piloting, you see. Up until just a while ago, I never had left Earth. Bookkeeper for Lunar Exports.”
“Bookkeeper!” yelped the mechanic. “How come a bookkeeper can handle a ship like that?”
“I learned it,” said Meek.
“You learned it?”
“Sure, from a book. I saved my money and I studied. I always wanted to see the Solar System and here I am.”
Dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook.
“Afraid this job might take a while,” he said. “Especially if we have to wait for parts. Have to get them in from Titan City. Why don’t you go over to the Inn. Tell Moe I sent you. They’ll treat you right.”
“Thank you,” said Meek, “but there’s something else I’m wondering about. There was another sign out there. Something about educated bugs.”
“Oh, them,” said the mechanic. “They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe belong ain’t the right word because they were on the rock before Gus took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to figure out what kind of game they were playing.”
“Game?” asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed.
“Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain’t. Not chess, neither. Even worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it figured out, they’d change the rules and throw him off again.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” protested Meek.
“Stranger,” declared the mechanic, solemnly, “there ain’t nothing about them bugs that make sense. Gus’ rock is the only one they’re on. Gus thinks maybe the rock don’t even belong to the Solar system. Thinks maybe it’s a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the Ring. That would explain why it’s the only one that has the bugs. They come along with it, see.”
“This Gus Hamilton,” said Meek. “I’d like to see him. Where could I find him?”
“Go over to the Inn and wait around,” advised the mechanic. “He’ll come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is.”
II
Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hangdog look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming in big batches.
“Lady,” he declared mournfully, “you sure picked yourself a job. The boys around here don’t take to being uplifted and improved. They ain’t worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that’s all they are.”
Henrietta Perkins, representative for the public health and welfare department of the Solar government, shuddered at his suggestion of anything so low it didn’t yearn for betterment.
“But those terrible feuds,” she protested. “Fighting just because they live in different parts of the Ring. It’s natural they might feel some rivalry, but all this killing! Surely they don’t enjoy getting killed.”
“Sure they enjoy it,” declared Moe. “Not being killed, maybe … although they’re willing to take a chance on that. Not many of them get killed, in fact. Just a few that get sort of careless. But even if some of them are killed, you can’t go messing around with that feud of theirs. If them boys out in sectors Twenty-Three and Thirty-Seven didn’t have their feud they’d plain die of boredom. They just got to have somebody to fight with. They been fighting, off and on, for years.”
“But they could fight with something besides guns,” said the welfare lady, a-smirk with righteousness. “That’s why I’m here. To try to get them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and disturbing channels. Direct their energies into other activities.”
“Like what?” asked Moe, fearing the worst.
“Athletic events,” said Miss Perkins.
“Tin shinny, maybe,” suggested Moe, trying to be sarcastic.
She missed the sarcasm. “Or spelling contests,” she said.
“Them fellow can’t spell,” insisted Moe.
“Games of some sort, then. Competitive games.”
“Now you’re talking,” Moe enthused. “They take to games. Seven-toed Pete with the deuces wild.”
The inner door of the entrance lock grated open and a spacesuited figure limped into the room. The spacesuit visor snapped up and a brush of grey whiskers spouted into view.
It was Gus Hamilton.
He glared at Moe. “What in tarnation is all this foolishness?” he demanded. “Got your message, I did, and here I am. But it better be important.”
He hobbled to the bar. Moe reached for a bottle and shoved it toward him, keeping out of reach.
“Have some trouble?” he asked, trying to be casual.
“Trouble! Hell, yes!” blustered Gus. “But I ain’t the only one that’s going to have trouble. Somebody sneaked over and stole the injector out of my space crate. Had to borrow Hank’s to get over here. But I know who it was. There ain’t but one other ring-rat got a rocket my injector will fit.”
“Bud Craney,” said Moe. It was no secret. Every man in the two sectors of the Ring knew just exactly what kind of spacecraft the other had.
“That’s right,” said Gus, “and I’m fixing to go over into Thirty-seven and yank Bud up by the roots.”
He took a jolt of liquor. “Yes, sir, I sure aim to crucify him.”
His eyes lighted on Miss Henrietta Perkins.
“Visitor?” he asked.
“She’s from the government,” said Moe.
“Revenuer?”
“Nope. From the welfare outfit. Aims to help you fellows out. Says there ain’t no sense in you boys in Twenty-three all the time fighting with the gang from Thirty-seven.”
Gus stared in disbelief.
Moe tried to be helpful. “She wants you to play games.”
Gus strangled on his drink, clawed for air, wiped his eyes.
“So that’s why you asked me over here. Another of your danged peace parleys. Come and talk things over, you said. So I came.”
“There’s something in what she says,” defended Moe. “You ring-rats been ripping up space for a long time now. Time you growed up and settled down. You’re aiming on going over right now and pulverizing Bud. It won’t do you any good.”
“I’ll get a heap of satisfaction out of it,” insisted Gus. “And, besides, I’ll get my injector back. Might even take a few things off Bud’s ship. Some of the parts on mine are wearing kind of thin.”
Gus took another drink, glowering at Miss Perkins.
“So the government sent you out to make us respectable,” he said.
“Merely to help you, Mr. Hamilton,” she declared. “To turn your hatreds into healthy competition.”
“Games, eh?” said Gus. “Maybe you got something, after all. Maybe we could fix up some kind of game. …”
“Forget it, Gus,” warned Moe. “If you’re thinking of energy guns at fifty paces, it’s out. Miss Perkins won’t stand for anything like that.”
Gus wiped his whiskers and looked hurt. “Nothing of the sort,” he denied. “Dang it, you must think I ain’t got no sportsmanship at all. I was thinking of a real sport. A game they play back on Earth and Mars. Read about it in my papers. Follow the teams, I do. Always wanted to see a game, but never did.”
Miss Perkins beamed. “What game is it, Mr. Hamilton?”
“Space polo,” said Gus.
“Why, how wonderful,” simpered Miss Perkins. “And you boys have the spaceships to play it with.”
Moe looked alarmed. “Miss Perkins,” he warned, “don’t let him talk you into it.”
“You shut your trap,” snapped Gus. “She wants us to play games, don’t she. Well, polo is a game. A nice, respectable game. Played in the best society.”
“It wouldn’t be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would play it,” predicted Moe. “It would turn into mass murder. Wouldn’t be one of you who wouldn’t be planning on getting even with someone else, once you got him in the open.”
Miss Perkins gasped. “Why, I’m sure they wouldn’t!”
“Of course we wouldn’t,” declared Gus, solemn as an owl.
“And that ain’t all,” said Moe, warming to the subject. “Those crates you guys got wouldn’t last out the first chukker. Most of them would just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can’t play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they’d split wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them.”
The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room.
“You’re prejudiced,” Gus told Moe. “You just don’t like space polo, that is all. You ain’t got no blueblood in you. We’ll leave it up to this man here. We’ll ask his opinion of it.”
The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles.
“My opinion, sir,” said Oliver Meek, “seldom amounts to much.”
“All we want to know,” Gus told him, “is what you think of space polo.”
“Space polo,” declared Meek, “is a noble game. It requires expert piloting, a fine sense of timing and. …”
“There, you see!” whooped Gus, triumphantly.
“I saw a game once,” Meek volunteered.
“Swell,” bellowed Gus. “We’ll have you coach our team.”
“But,” protested Meek, “but … but.”
“Oh, Mr. Hamilton,” exulted Miss Perkins, “you are so wonderful. You think of everything.”
“Hamilton!” squeaked Meek.
“Sure,” said Gus. “Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest doggone radiation moss you ever clapped your eyes on.”
“Then you’re the gentleman who has bugs,” said Meek.
“Now, look here,” warned Gus, “you watch what you say or I’ll hang one on you.”
“He means your rock bugs,” Moe explained, hastily.
“Oh, them,” said Gus.
“Yes,” said Meek, “I’m interested in them. I’d like to see them.”
“See them,” said Gus. “Mister, you can have them if you want them. Drove me out of house and home, they did. They’re dippy over metal. Any kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They’ll tromp you to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to eat my shack right out from underneath my feet.”
Meek looked crestfallen.
“Can’t get near them, then,” he said.
“Sure you can,” said Gus. “Why not?”
“Well, a spacesuit’s metal and. …”
“Got that all fixed up,” said Gus. “You come back with me and I’ll let you have a pair of stilts.”
“Stilts?”
“Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don’t know what wood is. Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you want to, long as you’re walking on the stilts.”
Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.
III
The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places preparatory to the start of another game.
For a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was Gus Hamilton’s moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game.
Oliver Meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of stone that jutted from the surface.
Even in his youth, Meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes on stilts. Here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. Meek knew now he was no expert. A half-dozen dents in his space armor was ample proof of that.
Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.
None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished. Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been reached, some point won, some advantage gained.
But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.
The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in. The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of a moon smashed up by Saturn’s pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.
Saturn itself, for that matter. A planet that kept Man at bay with deadly radiations. But radiations that, while they kept Man at a distance, at the same time served Man. For here, on the Inner Ring, where they had become so diluted that ordinary space armor filtered them out, they made possible the medical magic of the famous radiation moss.
One of the few forms of plant life found in the cold of space, the moss was nurtured by those mysterious radiations. Planted elsewhere, on kindlier worlds, it wilted and refused to grow. The radiations had been analyzed, Meek knew, and reproduced under laboratory conditions, but there still was something missing, some vital, elusive factor that could not be analyzed. Under the artificial radiation, the moss still wilted and died.
And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the mockery of space before them.
Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.
The bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously, watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.
Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly popping in and out of holes.
If there were opposing sides … and if it were a game, there’d have to be … they didn’t seem to alternate the moves. Although, Meek admitted, certain rules and conditions which he had failed to note or recognize, might determine the number and order of moves allowed each side.
Suddenly there was confusion on the board. For a moment a half-dozen of the bugs raced madly about, as if seeking the proper hole to occupy. Then, as suddenly, all movement had ceased. And in another moment, they were on the move again, orderly again, but retracing their movements, going back several plays beyond the point of confusion.
Just as one would do when one made a mistake working a mathematical problem … going back to the point of error and going on again from there.
“Well, I’ll be. …” Mr. Meek said.
Meek stiffened and the stylus floated out of his hand, settled softly on the rock below.
A mathematical problem!
His breath gurgled in his throat.
He knew it now! He should have known it all the time. But the mechanic had talked about the bugs playing games and so had Hamilton. That had thrown him off.
Games! Those bugs weren’t playing any game. They were solving mathematical equations!
Meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. One of the stilts slipped out of position and Meek felt himself start to fall. He dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space.
The other stilt went, then, and Meek found himself floating slowly downward, gravity weak but inexorable. His struggle to retain his balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed.
He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged. He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.
On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.
Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand before him. It was covered with the bugs.
Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of Hamilton’s shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.
Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.
“Gus will give me hell for this,” he told himself.
Gus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic scurrying within it.
“By rights,” he declared, judiciously, “I should take this over and dump it in Bud’s ship. Get even with him for swiping my injector.”
“But you got the injector back,” Meek pointed out.
“Oh, sure, I got it back,” admitted Gus. “But it wasn’t orthodox, it wasn’t. Just getting your property back ain’t getting even. I never did have a chance to smack Bud in the snoot the way I should of smacked him. Moe talked me into it. He was the one that had the idea the welfare lady should go over and talk to Bud. She must of laid it on thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and all that. Otherwise Bud never would have given her that injector.”
He shook his head dolefully. “This here Ring ain’t ever going to be the same again. If we don’t watch out, we’ll find ourselves being polite to one another.”
“That would be awful,” agreed Meek.
“Wouldn’t it, though,” declared Gus.
Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.
“Got him,” yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.
Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug inside.
“That makes twenty-eight of them,” said Meek.
“I told you,” Gus accused him, “that we hadn’t got them all. You better take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.”
“Chiggers,” Meek told him, “burrow into a person to lay eggs.”
“Maybe these things do, too,” Gus contended.
The radio on the mantel blared a warning signal, automatically tuning in on one of the regular newscasts from Titan City out on Saturn’s biggest moon.
The syrupy, chamber of commerce voice of the announcer was shaky with excitement and pride.
“Next week,” he said, “the annual Martian-Earth football game will be played at Greater New York on Earth. But in the Earth’s newspapers tonight another story has pushed even that famous classic of the sporting world down into secondary place.”
He paused and took a deep breath and his voice practically yodeled with delight.
“The sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and down the streets of Earth tonight, is one that will be played here in our own Saturnian system. A space polo game. To be played by two unknown, pickup, amateur teams down in the Inner Ring. Most of the men have never played polo before. Few if any of them have even seen a game. There may have been some of them who didn’t, at first, know what it was.
“But they’re going to play it. The men who ride those bucking rocks that make up the Inner Ring will go out into space in their rickety ships and fight it out. And ladies and gentlemen, when I say fight it out, I really mean fight it out. For the game, it seems, will be a sort of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in the Ring for years. No one knows what started the feud. It has gotten so it really doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that when men from sector Twenty-three meet those from sector Thirty-seven, the feud is taken up again. But that is at an end now. In a few days the feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the Inner Ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space polo. For the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy of one of the two sectors.”
Meek rose from his chair, opened his mouth as if to speak, but sank back again when Gus hissed at him and held a finger to his lips for silence.
“The teams are now in training,” went on the newscaster, the happy lilt in his voice still undimmed, “and it is understood that sector Twenty-three has the advantage, at the start at least, of having a polo expert as its coach. Just who this expert is no one can say. Several names have been mentioned, but. …”
“No, no,” yelped Meek, struggling to his feet, but Gus shushed him, poking a finger toward him and grinning like a bearded imp.
“… Bets are mounting high throughout the entire Saturnian system,” the announcer was saying, “but since little is known about the teams, the odds still are even. It is likely, however, that odds will be demanded on the sector of Thirty-seven team on the basis of the story about the expert coach.
“The very audacity of such a game has attracted solar-wide attention and special fleets of ships will leave both Earth and Mars within the next few days to bring spectators to the game. Newsmen from the inner worlds, among them some of the system’s most famous sports writers, are already on their way.
“Originally intended to be no more than a recreation project under the supervision of the department of health and welfare, the game has suddenly become a solar attraction. The Daily Rocket back on Earth is offering a gigantic loving cup for the winning team, while the Morning Spaceways has provided another loving cup, only slightly smaller, to be presented the player adjudged the most valuable to his team. We may have more to tell you about the game before the newscast is over, but in the meantime we shall go on to other news of Solar int. …”
Meek leaped up. “He meant me,” he whooped. “That was me he meant when he was talking about a famous coach!”
“Sure,” said Gus. “He couldn’t have meant anyone else but you.”
“But I’m not a famous coach,” protested Meek. “I’m not even a coach at all. I never saw but one space polo game in all my life. I hardly know how it’s played. I just know you go up there in space and bat a ball around. I’m going to. …”
“You ain’t going to do a blessed thing,” said Gus. “You ain’t skipping out on us. You’re staying right here and give us all the fine pointers of the game. Maybe you ain’t as hot as the newscaster made out, but you’re a dang sight better than anyone else around here. At least you seen a game once and that’s more than any of the rest of us have.”
“But I. …”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” declared Gus. “You’re just pretending you don’t know anything about polo, that’s all. Maybe you’re a fugitive from justice. Maybe that’s why you’re so anxious to make a getaway. Only reason you stopped at all was because your ship got stoved up.”
“I’m no fugitive,” declared Meek, drawing himself up. “I’m just a bookkeeper out to see the system.”
“Forget it,” said Gus. “Forget it. Nobody around here’s going to give you away. If they even so much as peep, I’ll plain paralyze them. So you’re a bookkeeper. That’s good enough for me. Just let anyone say you ain’t a bookkeeper and see what happens to him.”
Meek opened his mouth to speak, closed it again. What was the use? Here he was, stuck again. Just like back on Juno when that preacher had thought he was a gunman and talked him into taking over the job of cleaning up the town. Only this time it was a space polo game and he knew even less about space polo than he did about being a lawman.
Gus rose and limped slowly across the room. Ponderously, he hauled a red bandana out of his back pocket and carefully dusted off the one uncrowded space on the mantel shelf, between the alarm clock and the tarnished silver model of a rocket ship.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “she’ll look right pretty there.”
He backed away and stared at the place on the shelf.
“I can almost see her now,” he said. “Glinting in the lamplight. Something to keep me company. Something to look at when I get lonesome.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Meek.
“That there cup the radio was talking about,” said Gus. “The one for the most valuable team member.”
Meek stammered. “But … but. …”
“I’m going to win her,” Gus declared.
IV
Saturn Inn bulged. Every room was crowded, with half a dozen to the cubicle, sleeping in relays. Those who couldn’t find anywhere else to sleep spread blankets in the narrow corridors or dozed off in chairs or slept on the barroom floor. A few of them got stepped on.
Titan City’s Junior Chamber of Commerce had done what it could to help the situation out, but the notice had been short. A half-dozen nearby rocks which had been hastily leveled off for parking space, now were jammed with hundreds of space vehicles, ranging from the nifty two man job owned by Billy Jones, sports editor of the Daily Rocket, to the huge excursion liners sent out by the three big transport companies. A few hastily-erected shelters helped out to some extent, but none of these shelters had a bar and were mostly untenanted.
Moe, the bartender at the Inn, harried with too many customers, droopy with lack of sleep, saw Oliver Meek bobbing around in the crowd that surged against the bar, much after the manner of a cork caught in a raging whirlpool. He reached out a hand and dragged Meek against the bar.
“Can’t you do something to stop it?”
Meek blinked at him. “Stop what?”
“This game,” said Moe. “It’s awful, Mr. Meek. Honestly. The crowd has got the fellers so worked up, it’s apt to be mass murder.”
“I know it,” Meek agreed, “but you can’t stop it now. The Junior Chamber of Commerce would take the hide off anyone who even said he would like to see it stopped. It’s more publicity than Saturn has gotten since the first expeditions were lost here.”
“I don’t like it,” declared Moe, stolidly.
“I don’t like it either,” Meek confessed. “Gus and those other fellows on his team think I’m an expert. I told them what I knew about space polo, but it wasn’t much. Trouble is they think it’s everything there is to know. They figure they’re a cinch to win and they got their shirts bet on the game. If they lose, they’ll more than likely spacewalk me.”
Fingers tapped Meek’s shoulders and he twisted around. A red face loomed above him, a cigarette drooping from the corner of its lips.
“Hear you say you was coaching the Twenty-three bunch?”
Meek gulped.
“Billy Jones, that’s me,” said the lips with the cigarette. “Best damn sports writer ever pounded keys. Been trying to find out who you was. Nobody else knows. Treat you right.”
“You must be wrong,” said Meek.
“Never wrong,” insisted Jones. “Nose for news. Smell it out. Like this. Sniff. Sniff.”
His nose crinkled in imitation of a bloodhound, but his face didn’t change otherwise. The cigarette still dangled, pouring smoke into a watery left eye.
“Heard the guy call you Meek,” said Jones. “Name sounds familiar. Something about Juno, wasn’t it? Rounded up a bunch of crooks. Found a space monster of some sort.”
Another hand gripped Meek by the shoulder and literally jerked him around.
“So you’re the guy!” yelped the owner of the hand. “I been looking for you. I’ve a good notion to smack you in the puss.”
“Now, Bud,” yelled Moe, in mounting fear, “you leave him alone. He ain’t done a thing.”
Meek gaped at the angry face of the hulking man, who still had his shoulder in the grip of a monstrous paw.
Bud Craney! The ring-rat that had stolen Gus’ injector! The captain of the Thirty-seven team.
“If there was room,” Craney grated, “I’d wipe up the floor with you. But since there ain’t, I’m just plain going to hammer you down about halfway into it.”
“But he ain’t done nothing!” shrilled Moe.
“He’s an outsider, ain’t he?” demanded Craney. “What business he got coming in here and messing around with things?”
“I’m not messing around with things, Mr. Craney,” Meek declared, trying to be dignified about it. But it was hard to be dignified with someone lifting one by the shoulder so one’s toes just barely touched the floor.
“All that’s the matter with you,” insisted the dangling Meek, “is that you know Gus and his men will give you a whipping. They’d done it, anyhow. I haven’t helped them much. I haven’t helped them hardly at all.”
Craney howled in rage. “Why … you … you. …”
And then Oliver Meek did one of those things no one ever expected him to do, least of all himself.
“I’ll bet you my spaceship,” he said, “against anything you got.”
Astonished, Craney opened his hand and let him down on the floor.
“You’ll what?” he roared.
“I’ll bet you my spaceship,” said Meek, the madness still upon him, “that Twenty-three will beat you.”
He rubbed it in. “I’ll even give you odds.”
Craney gasped and sputtered. “I don’t want any odds,” he yelped. “I’ll take it even. My moss patch against your ship.”
Someone was calling Meek’s name in the crowd.
“Mr. Meek! Mr. Meek!”
“Here,” said Meek.
“What about that story?” demanded Billy Jones, but Meek didn’t hear him.
A man was tearing his way through the crowd. It was one of the men from Twenty-three.
“Mr. Meek,” he panted, “you got to come right away. It’s Gus. He’s all tangled up with rheumatiz!”
Gus stared up with anguished eyes at Meek.
“It sneaked up on me while I slept,” he squeaked. “Laid off of me for years until just now. Limped once in a while, of course, and got a few twinges now and then, but that was all. Never had me tied up like this since I left Earth. One of the reasons I never did go back to Earth. Space is good climate for rheumatiz. Cold but dry. No moisture to get into your bones.”
Meek looked around at the huddled men, saw the worry that was etched upon their faces.
“Get a hot water bottle,” he told one of them.
“Hell,” said Russ Jensen, a hulking framed spaceman, “there ain’t no such a thing as a hot water bottle nearer than Titan City.”
“An electric pad, then.”
Jensen shook his head. “No pads, neither. Only thing we can do is pour whiskey down him and if we pour enough down him to cure the rheumatiz, we’ll get him drunk and he won’t be no more able to play in that game than he is right now.”
Meek’s weak eyes blinked behind his glasses, staring at Gus.
“We’ll lose sure if Gus can’t play,” said Jensen, “and me with everything I got bet on our team.”
Another man spoke up. “Meek could play in Gus’ place.”
“Nope, he couldn’t,” declared Jensen. “The rats from Thirty-seven wouldn’t stand for it.”
“They couldn’t do a thing about it,” declared the other man. “Meek’s been here six weeks today. That makes him a resident. Six Earth weeks, the law says. And all that time he’s been in sector Twenty-three. They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. They might squawk but they couldn’t make it stick.”
“You’re certain of that?” demanded Jensen.
“Dead certain,” said the other.
Meek saw them looking at him, felt a queasy feeling steal into his stomach.
“I couldn’t,” he told them. “I couldn’t do it. I … I. …”
“You go right ahead, Oliver,” said Gus. “I wanted to play, of course. Sort of set my heart on that cup. Had the mantel piece all dusted off for it. But if I can’t play, there ain’t another soul I’d rather have play in my place than you.”
“But I don’t know a thing about polo,” protested Meek.
“You taught it to us, didn’t you?” bellowed Jensen. “You pretended like you knew everything there was to know.”
“But I don’t,” insisted Meek. “You wouldn’t let me explain. You kept telling me all the time what a swell coach I was and when I tried to argue with you and tell you that I wasn’t you yelled me down. I never saw more than one game in all my life and the only reason I saw it then was because I found the ticket. It was on the sidewalk and I picked it up. Somebody had dropped it.”
“So you been stringing us along,” yelped Jensen. “You been making fools of us! How do we know but you showed us wrong. You been giving us the wrong dope.”
He advanced on Meek and Meek backed against the wall.
Jensen lifted his fist, held it in front of him as if he were weighing it.
“I ought to bop you one,” he decided. “All of us had ought to bop you one. Every danged man in this here room has got his shirt bet on the game because we figured we couldn’t lose with a coach like you.”
“So have I,” said Meek. But it wasn’t until he said it that he really realized he did have his shirt bet on Twenty-three. His spaceship. It wasn’t all he had, of course, but it was the thing that was nearest to his heart … the thing he had slaved for thirty years to buy.
He suddenly remembered those years now. Years of bending over account books in the dingy office back on Earth, watching other men go out in space, longing to go himself. Counting pennies so that he could go. Spending only a dime for lunch and eating crackers and cheese instead of going out for dinner in the evening. Piling up the dollars, slowly through the years … dollars to buy the ship that now stood out on the field, all damage repaired. Sitting, poised for space.
But if Thirty-seven won it wouldn’t be his any longer. It would be Craney’s. He’d just made a bet with Craney and there were plenty of witnesses to back it up.
“Well?” demanded Jensen.
“I will play,” said Meek.
“And you really know about the game? You wasn’t kidding us?”
Meek looked at the men before him and the expression on their faces shaped his answer.
He gulped … gulped again. Then slowly nodded.
“Sure, I know about it,” he lied.
They didn’t look quite satisfied.
He glanced around, but there was no way of escape. He faced them again, back pressed against the wall.
He tried to make his voice light and breezy, but he couldn’t quite keep out the croak.
“Haven’t played it much in the last few years,” he said, “but back when I was a kid I was a ten-goal man.”
They were satisfied at that.
V
Hunched behind the controls, Meek slowly circled Gus’ crate, waiting for the signal, half fearful of what would happen when it came.
Glancing to left and right, he could see the other ships of Sector Twenty-three, slowly circling too, red identification lights strung along their hulls.
Ten miles away a gigantic glowing ball danced in the middle of the space-field, bobbing around like a jigging lantern. And beyond it were the circling blue lights of the Thirty-seven team. And beyond them the glowing green space-buoys that marked the Thirty-seven goal line.
Meek bent an attentive ear to the ticking of the motor, listening intently for the alien click he had detected a moment before. Gus’ ship, to tell the truth, was none too good. It might have been a good ship once, but now it was worn out. It was sluggish and slow to respond to the controls, it had a dozen little tricks that kept one on the jump. It had followed space trails too long, had plumped down to too many bumpy landings in the maelstrom of the Belt.
Meek sighed gustily. It would have been different if they had let him take his own ship, but it was only on the condition that he use Gus’ ship that Thirty-seven had agreed to let him play at all. They had raised a fuss about it, but Twenty-three had the law squarely on its side.
He stole a glance toward the sidelines and saw hundreds of slowly cruising ships. Ships crammed with spectators out to watch the game. Radio ships that would beam a play by play description to be channeled to every radio station throughout the Solar system. Newsreel ships that would film the clash of opposing craft. Ships filled with newsmen who would transmit reams of copy back to Earth and Mars.
Looking at them, Meek shuddered.
How in the world had he ever let himself get into a thing like this? He was out to see the solar system, not to play a polo game … especially a polo game he didn’t want to play.
It had been the bugs, of course. If it hadn’t been for the bugs, Gus never would have had the chance to talk him into that coaching business.
He should have spoken out, of course. Told them, flat out, that he didn’t know a thing about polo. Made them understand he wasn’t going to have a thing to do with this silly scheme. But they had shouted at him and laughed at him and bullied him. Been nice to him, too. That was the biggest trouble. He was a sucker, he knew, for anyone who was nice to him. Not many people had been.
Maybe he should have gone to Miss Henrietta Perkins and explained. She might have listened and understood. Although he wasn’t any too sure about that. She probably had plenty to do with starting the publicity rolling. After all, it was her job to make a showing on the jobs she did.
If it hadn’t been for Gus dusting off the place on the mantelpiece. If it hadn’t been for the Titan City Junior Chamber of Commerce. If it hadn’t been for all the ballyhoo about the mystery coach.
But more especially, if he’d kept his fool mouth shut and not made that bet with Craney.
Meek groaned and tried to remember the few things he did know about polo. And he couldn’t think of a single thing, not even some of the things he had made up and told the boys.
Suddenly a rocket flared from the referee’s ship and with a jerk Meek hauled back the throttle. The ship gurgled and stuttered and for a moment, heart in his throat, Meek thought it was going to blow up right then and there.
But it didn’t. It gathered itself together and leaped, forcing Meek hard against the chair, snapping back his head. Dazed, he reached out for the repulsor trigger.
Ahead the glowing ball bounced and quivered, jumped this way and that as the ships spun in a mad melee with repulsor beams whipping out like stabbing knives.
Two of the ships crashed and fell apart like matchboxes. A third, trying a sharp turn above the field of play, came unstuck and strewed itself across fifty miles of space.
Substitute ships dashed in from the sidelines, signalled by the referee’s blinking light. Rescue ships streaked out to pick up the players, salvage ships to clear away the pieces.
For a fleeting moment, Meek got the bobbing sphere in the cross-hairs and squeezed the trigger. The ball jumped as if someone had smacked it with his fist, sailed across the field.
Fighting to bring the ship around, Meek yelled in fury at its slowness. Desperately pouring on the juice, he watched with agony as a blue-lighted ship streamed down across the void, heading for the ball.
The ship groaned in every joint, protesting and twisting as if in agony, as Meek forced it around. Suddenly there was a snap and the sudden swoosh of escaping air. Startled, Meek looked up. Bare ribs stood out against star-spangled space. A plate had been ripped off!
Face strained behind the visor of his spacesuit, hunched over the controls, he waited for the rest of the plates to go. By some miracle they hung on. One worked loose and flapped weirdly as the ship shivered in the turn.
But the turn had taken too long and Meek was too late. The blue-lamped ship already had the ball, was streaking for the goal line. Jensen somehow had had sense enough to refuse to be sucked out of goalie position, and now he charged in to intercept.
But he muffed his chance. He dived in too fast and missed with his repulsor beam by a mile at least. The ball sailed over the lighted buoys and the first chukker was over with Thirty-seven leading by one score.
The ships lined up again.
The rocket flared from the starter’s ship and the ships plunged out. One of Thirty-seven’s ships began to lose things. Plates broke loose and fell away, a rocket snapped its moorings and sailed off at a tangent, spouting gouts of flame, the structural ribs came off and strewed themselves along like spilling toothpicks.
Battered by repulsor beams, the ball suddenly bounced upward and Meek, trailing the field, waiting for just such a chance, played a savage tune on the tube controls.
The ship responded with a snap, executing a half roll and a hairpin turn that shook the breath from Meek. Two more plates tore off in the turn, but the ship plowed on. Now the ball was dead ahead and Meek gave it the works. The beam hit squarely and Meek followed through. The second chukker was over and the score was tied.
Not until he was curving back above the Thirty-seven goal line, did Meek have time to wonder what had happened to the ship. It was sluggish no longer. It was full of zip. Almost like driving his own sleek craft. Almost as if, the ship knew where he wanted it to go and went there.
A hint of motion on the instrument panel caught his eye and he bent close to see what it was. He stiffened. The panel seemed to be alive. Seemed to be crawling.
He bent closer and froze. It was crawling. There was no doubt of that. Crawling with rock-bugs.
Breath whistling between his teeth, Meek ducked his head under the panel. Every wire, every control was oozing bugs!
For a moment he sat paralyzed by the thoughts that flickered through his brain.
Gus, he knew, would have his scalp for this. Because he was the one that had brought the bugs over to the rock where Gus lived and kept the ship. They thought, of course, they had caught all of them that were on his suit, but now it was clear they hadn’t. Some of them must have gotten away and found the ship. They would have made straight for it, of course, because of the alloys that were in it. Why bother with a spacesuit or anything else when there was a ship around.
Only there were too many of them. There were thousands in the instrument panel and other thousands in the controls and he couldn’t have brought back that many. Not if he’d hauled them back in pails.
What was it Gus had said about them burrowing into metal just like chiggers burrow into human flesh?
Chiggers attacked humans to lay their eggs. Maybe … maybe. …
A battalion of the bugs trooped across the face of an indicator and Meek saw they were smaller than the ones he had seen back on Gus’ rock.
There was no doubt about it. They were young bugs. Bugs that has just hatched out. Thousands of them … millions of them, maybe! And they wouldn’t be in the instruments and controls alone, but all through the ship. They’d be in the motors and the firing mechanisms … all the places where the best alloys were used.
Meek wrung his hands, watching them play tag across the panel. If they’d had to hatch, why couldn’t they have waited. Just until the game was over, anyhow. That would have been all he’d asked. But they hadn’t and here he was, with a couple of million bugs or so right smack in his lap.
The rocket flared again and the ships shot out.
Bitterness chewing at him, Meek flung the ship out savagely. What did it matter what happened now. Gus would take the hide off him, rheumatism or no rheumatism, as soon as he found out about the bugs.
For a wild moment, he hoped he would crack up. Maybe the ship would fall apart like some of the others had. Like the old one hoss shay the poet had written about centuries ago. The ship had lost so many plates that even now it was like flying a space-going box-kite.
Suddenly a ship loomed directly ahead, diving from the zenith. Meek, forgetting his half-formed hope of a crackup a second before, froze in terror, but his fingers acted by pure instinct, stabbing at keys. Although in the petrified second that seemed half an eternity, Meek knew the ships would crash before he even touched the keys. And even as he thought it, the ship ducked in a nerve-rending jerk and they were skinning past, hulls almost touching. Another jerk and more plates gone and there was the ball, directly ahead, with the repulsor beam already licking out.
Meek’s jaw fell and a chill ran through his body and he couldn’t move a muscle. For he hadn’t even touched the trigger and yet the repulsor beam was flaring out, driving the ball ahead of it while the ship twisted and squirmed its way through a mass of fighting craft.
Hands dangling limply at his side, Meek gaped in terror and disbelief. He wasn’t touching the controls, and yet the ship was like a thing bewitched. A split second later the ball was over the goal and the ship was curving back, repulsor beam snapped off.
“It’s the bugs!” Meek whispered to himself, lips scarcely moving. “The bugs have taken over!”
The craft he was riding, he knew, was no longer just a ship, but a collection of rock-bugs. Bugs that could work out mathematical equations. And now were playing polo!
For what was polo, anyhow, except a mathematical equation, a problem of using certain points of force at certain points in space to arrive at a predetermined end? Back on Gus’ rock the bugs had worked as a unit to solve equations … and the new hatch in the ship was working as a unit, too, to solve another kind of problem … the problem of taking a certain ball to a certain point despite certain variable and random factors in the form of opposing spaceships.
Tentatively, half fearfully, Meek stabbed cautiously at a key which should have turned the ship. The ship didn’t turn. Meek snatched his hand away as if the key had burned his finger.
Back on the line the ship wheeled into position of its own accord and a moment later was off again. Meek clung to his chair with shaking hands. There was, he knew, no use of even pretending he was trying to operate the ship. There was just one thing that he was glad of. No one could see him sitting there, doing nothing.
But the time would come … and soon … when he would have to do something. For he couldn’t let the ship return to the Ring. To do that would be to infest the other ships parked there, spread the bugs throughout the solar system. And those bugs definitely were something the solar system could get along without.
The ship shuddered and twisted, weaving its way through the pack of players. More plates ripped loose. Glancing up, Meek could see the glory of Saturn through the gleaming ribs.
Then the ball was over the line and Meek’s team mates were shrieking at him over the radio in his spacesuit … happy, glee-filled yells of triumph. He didn’t answer. He was too busy ripping out the control wires. But it didn’t help. Even while he was doing it the ship went on unhampered and piled up another score.
Apparently the bugs didn’t need the controls to make the ship do what they wanted. More than likely they were in control of the firing mechanism at its very source. Maybe, and the thought curled the hair on Meek’s neck, they were the firing mechanism. Maybe they had integrated themselves with the very structure of the entire mechanism of the ship. That would make the ship alive. A living chunk of machinery that paid no attention to the man who sat at the controls.
Meanwhile, the ship made another goal. …
There was a way to stop the bugs … only one way … but it was dangerous.
But probably not half as dangerous, Meek told himself, as Gus or the Junior Chamber or the Thirty-seven team … especially the Thirty-seven team … if any of them found out what was going on.
He found a wrench and crawled back along the shivering ship.
Working in a frenzy of fear and need for haste, Meek took off the plate that sealed the housing of the rear rocket assembly. Breath hissing in his throat, he fought the burrs that anchored the tubes. There were a lot of them and they didn’t come off easily. Rockets had to be anchored securely … securely enough so the blast of atomic fire within their chambers wouldn’t rip them free.
Meanwhile, the ship piled up the score.
Loose burrs rolled and danced along the floor and Meek knew the ship was in the thick of play again. Then they were curving back. Another goal!
Suddenly the rocket assembly shook a little, began to vibrate. Wielding the wrench like a madman, knowing he had seconds at the most, Meek spun two or three more bolts, then dropped the wrench and ran. Leaping for a hole from which a plate had been torn, he caught a rib, swung with every ounce of power he had, launching himself into space.
His right hand fumbled for the switch of the suit’s rocket motor, found it, snapped it on to full acceleration. Something seemed to hit him on the head and he sailed into the depths of blackness.
VI
Billy Jones sat in the office of the repair shop, cigarette dangling from his lip, pouring smoke into his watery eye.
“Never saw anything like it in my life,” he declared. “How he made that ship go at all with half the plates ripped off is way beyond me.”
The dungareed mechanic sighted along the toes of his shoes, planted comfortably on the desk.
“Let me tell you, mister,” he declared, “the solar system never has known a pilot like him … never will again. He brought his ship down here with the instruments knocked out. Dead reckoning.”
“Wrote a great piece about him,” Billy said. “How he died in the best tradition of space. Stuff like that. The readers will eat it up. The way that ship let go he didn’t have a chance. Seemed to go out of control all at once and went weaving and bucking almost into Saturn. Then blooey … that’s the end of it. One big splash of flame.”
The mechanic squinted carefully at his toes. “They’re still out there, messing around,” he said. “But they’ll never find him. When that ship blew up he was scattered halfway out to Pluto.”
The inner lock swung open ponderously and a spacesuited figure stepped in.
They waited while he snapped back his helmet.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Oliver Meek.
They stared, slack-jawed.
Jones was the first to recover. “But it can’t be you! Your ship … it exploded!”
“I know,” said Meek. “I got out just before it went. Turned on my suit rocket full blast. Knocked me out. By the time I come to I was halfway out to the second Ring. Took me awhile to get back.”
He turned to the mechanic. “Maybe you have a second hand suit you would sell me. I have to get rid of this one. Has some bugs in it.”
“Bugs? Oh, yes, I see. You mean something’s wrong with it.”
“That’s it,” said Meek. “Something’s wrong with it.”
“I got one I’ll let you have, free for nothing,” said the mechanic. “Boy, that was a swell game you played!”
“Could I have the suit now?” asked Meek. “I’m in a hurry to get away.”
Jones bounced to his feet. “But you can’t leave. Why, they think you’re dead. They’re out looking for you. And you won the cup … the cup as the most valuable team member.”
“I just can’t stay,” said Meek. He shuffled his feet uneasily. “Got places to go. Things to see. Stayed too long already.”
“But the cup. …”
“Tell Gus I won the cup for him. Tell him to put it on that mantelpiece. In the place he dusted off for it.”
Meek’s blue eyes shone queerly behind his glasses. “Tell him maybe he’ll think of me sometimes when he looks at it.”
The mechanic brought the suit. Meek bundled it under his arm, started for the lock.
Then turned back.
“Maybe you gentlemen. …”
“Yes,” said Jones.
“Maybe you can tell me how many goals I made. I lost count, you see.”
“You made nine,” said Jones.
Meek shook his head. “Must be getting old,” he said. “When I was a kid I was a ten goal man.”
Then he was gone, the lock swinging shut behind him.
The Call from Beyond
I
The Pyramid of Bottles
The pyramid was built of bottles, hundreds of bottles that flashed and glinted as if with living fire, picking up and breaking up the misty light that filtered from the distant sun and still more distant stars.
Frederick West took a slow step forward, away from the open port of his tiny ship. He shook his head and shut his eyes and opened them again and the pyramid was still there. So it was no figment, as he had feared, of his imagination, born in the darkness and the loneliness of his flight from Earth.
It was there and it was a crazy thing. Crazy because it should not be there, at all. There should be nothing here on this almost unknown slab of tumbling stone and metal.
For no one lived on Pluto’s moon. No one ever visited Pluto’s moon. Even he, himself, hadn’t intended to until, circling it to have a look before going on to Pluto, he had seen that brief flash of light, as if someone might be signaling. It had been the pyramid, of course. He knew that now. The stacked-up bottles catching and reflecting light.
Behind the pyramid stood a space hut, squatted down among the jagged boulders. But there was no movement, no sign of life. No one was tumbling out of the entrance lock to welcome him. And that was strange, he thought. For visitors must be rare, if, indeed, they came at all.
Perhaps the pyramid really was a signaling device, although it would be a clumsy way of signaling. More likely a madman’s caprice. Come to think of it, anyone who was sufficiently deranged to live on Pluto’s moon would be a fitting architect for a pyramid of bottles.
The moon was so unimportant that it wasn’t even named. The spacemen, on those rare occasions when they mentioned it at all, simply called it “Pluto’s moon” and let it go at that.
No one came out to this sector of space any more. Which, West told himself parenthetically, is exactly why I came. For if you could slip through the space patrol you would be absolutely safe. No one would ever bother you.
No one bothered Pluto these days. Not since the ban had been slapped on it three years before, since the day the message had come through from the scientists in the cold laboratories which had been set up several years before that.
No one came to the planet now. Especially with the space patrol on guard … although there were ways of slipping through. If one knew where the patrol ships would be at certain times and build up one’s speed and shut off the engines, coasting on momentum in the shadow of the planet, one could get to Pluto.
West was near the pyramid now and he saw that it was built of whisky bottles. All empty, very empty, their labels fresh and clear.
West straightened up from staring at the bottles and advanced toward the hut. Locating the lock, he pressed the button. There was no response. He pressed it again. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the lock swung in its seat. Swiftly he stepped inside and swung over the lever that closed the outer lock, opened the inner one.
Dim light oozed from the interior of the hut and through his earphones West heard the dry rustle of tiny claws whispering across the floor. Then a gurgling, like water running down a pipe.
Heart in his mouth, thumb hooked close to the butt of his pistol, West stepped quickly across the threshold of the lock.
A man, clad in motheaten underwear, sat on the edge of the cot. His hair was long and untrimmed, his whiskers sprouted in black ferocity. From the mat of beard two eyes stared out, like animals brought to bay in caves. A bony hand thrust out a whisky bottle in a gesture of invitation.
The whiskers moved and a croak came from them. “Have a snort,” it said.
West shook his head. “I don’t drink.”
“I do,” the whiskers said. The hand tilted the bottle and the bottle gurgled.
West glanced swiftly around the room. No radio. That made it simpler. If there had been a radio he would have had to smash it. For, he realized now, it had been a silly thing to do, stopping on this moon. No one knew where he was … and that was the way it should have stood.
West snapped his visor up.
“Drinking myself to death,” the whiskers told him.
West stared, astounded at the utter poverty, at the absolute squalor of the place.
“Three years,” said the man. “Not a single sober breath in three solid years.” He hiccuped. “Getting me,” he said. His left hand came up and thumped his shrunken chest. Lint flew from the ragged underwear. The right hand still clutched the bottle.
“Earth years,” the whiskers explained. “Three Earth years. Not Pluto years.”
A thing that chattered came out of the shadows in one corner of the hut and leaped upon the bed. It hunched itself beside the man and stared leeringly at West, its mouth a slit that drooled across its face, its puckered hide a horror in the sickly light.
“Meet Annabelle,” said the man. He whistled at the thing and it clambered to his shoulder, cuddling against his cheek.
West shivered at the sight.
“Just passing through?” the man inquired.
“My name is West,” West told him. “Heading for Pluto.”
“Ask them to show you the painting,” said the man. “Yes, you must see the painting.”
“The painting?”
“You deaf?” asked the man, belligerently. “I said a painting. You understand—a picture.”
“I understand,” said West. “But I didn’t know there were any paintings there. Didn’t even know there was anybody there.”
“Sure there is,” said the man. “There’s Louis and—”
He lifted the bottle and took a snort.
“I got alcoholism,” said the man. “Good thing, alcoholism. Keeps colds away. Can’t catch a cold when you got alcoholism. Kills you quicker than a cold, though. Why, you might go on for years having colds—”
“Look,” urged West, “you have to tell me about Pluto. About who’s there. And the painting. How come you know about them?”
The eyes regarded him with drunken cunning.
“You’d have to do something for me. Couldn’t give you information like that out of the goodness of my heart.”
“Of course,” agreed West. “Anything that you would like. You just name it.”
“You got to take Annabelle out of here,” the man told him. “Take her back where she belongs. It isn’t any place for a girl like her. No fit life for her to lead. Living with a sodden wreck like me. Used to be a great man once … yes, sir, a great man. It all came of looking for a bottle. One particular bottle. Had to sample all of them. Every last one. And when I sampled them, there was nothing else to do but drink them up. They’d spoil for sure if you let them stand around. And who wants a lot of spoiled liquor cluttering up the place?”
He took another shot.
“Been at it ever since,” he explained. “Almost got them now. Ain’t many of them left. Used to think that I’d find the right bottle before it was too late and then everything would be all right. Wouldn’t do me no good to find it now, because I’m going to die. Enough left to last me, though. Aim to die plastered. Happy way to die.”
“But what about those people on Pluto?” demanded West.
The whiskers snickered. “I fooled them. They gave me my choice. Take anything you want, they said. Bighearted, you understand. Pals to the very last. So I took the whisky. Cases of it. They didn’t know, you see. I tricked them.”
“I’m sure you did,” said West. Tiny, icy feet ran up and down his spine. For there was madness here, he knew, but madness with a pattern. Somewhere, somehow, this twisted talk would fall into a pattern that would make sense.
“But something went wrong,” the man declared. “Something went wrong.”
Silence whistled in the room.
“You see, Mr. Best,” the man declared. “I—”
“West,” said West. “Not Best. West.”
The man did not seem to notice. “I’m going to die, you understand. Any minute, maybe. Got a liver and heart and either one could kill me. Drinking does that to you. Never used to drink. Got into the habit when I was sampling all these bottles. Got a taste for it. Then there wasn’t anything to do—”
He hunched forward.
“Promise you will take Annabelle,” he croaked.
Annabelle tittered at West, slobber drooling from her mouth.
“But I can’t take her back,” West protested, “unless I know where she came from. You have to tell me that.”
The man waggled a finger. “From far away,” he croaked, “and yet not so very far. Not so very far if you know the way.”
West eyed Annabelle with the gorge rising in his throat.
“I will take her,” he said. “But you have to tell me where.”
“Thank you, Guest,” said the man. He lifted the bottle and let it gurgle.
“Not Guest,” said West, patiently. “My name is—”
The man toppled forward off the bed, sprawled across the floor. The bottle rolled crazily, spilling liquor in sporadic gushes.
West leaped forward, knelt beside the man and lifted him. The whiskers moved and a whisper came from their tangled depths, a gasping whisper that was scarcely more than a waning breath.
“Tell Louis that his painting—”
“Louis?” yelled West. “Louis who? What about—”
The whisper came again. “Tell him … someday … he’ll paint a wrong place and then. …”
Gently West laid the man back on the floor and stepped away. The whisky bottle still rocked to and fro beneath a chair where it had come to rest.
Something glinted at the head of the cot and West walked to where it hung. It was a watch, a shining watch, polished with years of care. It swung slowly from a leather thong tied to the rod that formed the cot’s head, where a man could reach out in the dark and read it.
West took it in his hand and turned it over, saw the engraving that ran across its back. Bending low, he read the inscription in the feeble light.
To Walter J. Darling, from class of ’16,
Mars Polytech.
West straightened, understanding and disbelief stirring in his mind.
Walter J. Darling, that huddle on the floor? Walter J. Darling, one of the solar system’s greatest biologists, dead in this filthy hut? Darling, teacher for years at Mars Polytechnical Institute, that shrunken, liquor-sodden corpse in shoddy underwear?
West wiped his forehead with the back of his space-gloved hand. Darling had been a member of that mysterious government commission assigned to the cold laboratories on Pluto, sent there to develop artificial hormones aimed at controlled mutation of the human race. A mission that had been veiled in secrecy from the first because it was feared, and rightly so, that revelation of its purpose might lead to outraged protests from a humanity that could not imagine why it should be improved biologically.
A mission, thought West, that had set out in mystery and ended in mystery, mystery that had sent whispers winging through the solar system. Shuddery whispers.
Louis? That would be Louis Nevin, another member of the Pluto commission. He was the man Darling had tried to tell about just before he died.
And Nevin must still be out here on Pluto, must still be alive despite the message that had come to Earth.
But the painting didn’t fit. Nevin wasn’t an artist. He was a biologist, scarcely second to Darling.
The message of three years before had been a phony, then. There were men still on the planet.
And that meant, West told himself bitterly, that his own plan had gone awry. For Pluto was the only place in the Solar System where there would be food and shelter and to which no one would ever come.
He remembered how he had planned it all so carefully … how it had seemed a perfect answer. There would be many years’ supply of food stacked in the storerooms, there would be comfortable living quarters, and there would be tools and equipment should he ever need them. And, of course, the Thing, whatever it might be. The horror that had closed the planet, that had set the space patrol to guard the planet’s loneliness.
But West had never been too concerned with what he might find on Pluto, for whatever it might be, it could be no worse than the bitterness that was his on Earth.
There was something going on at the Pluto laboratories. Something that the government didn’t know about or that the government had suppressed along with that now infamous report of three years before.
Something that Darling could have told him had he wanted to … or had he been able. But now Walter J. Darling was past all telling. West would have to find out by himself.
West stepped to where he lay, lifted him to the cot and covered him with a tattered blanket.
Perched on the cot head, Annabelle chattered and giggled and drooled.
“Come here, you,” said West. “Come on over here.”
Annabelle came, slowly and coyly. West lifted her squeamishly, thrust her into an outer pocket and zipped it shut. He started toward the doorway.
On the way out he picked the empty bottle from the floor, added it to the pyramid outside.
II
The White Singer
West’s craft fled like a silvery shadow between the towering mountain peaks shielding the only valley on Pluto that had ever known the tread of Man.
Coasting in on silent motors in the shadow of the planet, he had eluded the patrol. Beyond the mountains he had thrown in the motors, had braked the plunging ship almost to a crawl, taking the chance the flare of the rockets might be seen by any of the patrol far out in space.
And now, speed reduced, dropping in a long slant toward the glass-smooth landing field, he huddled over the controls, keyed to a free-fall landing, always dangerous at best. But it would be as dangerous, he sensed, to advertise his coming with another rocket blast. The field was long and smooth. If he hit it right and not too far out, there would be plenty of room.
The almost nonexistent atmosphere was a point in favor. There were no eddies, no currents of air to deflect the ship, send it into a spin or a dangerous wobble.
Off to the right he caught a flash of light and his mind clicked the split-second answer that it must be the laboratory.
Then the ship was down, pancaking, hissing along the landing strip, friction gripping the hull. It stopped just short of a jumbled pile of rock and West let out his breath, felt his heart take up the beat again. A few feet more. …
Locking the controls, he hung the key around his neck, pulled down the visor of his space gear and let himself out of the ship.
Across the field glowed the lights of the laboratory. He had not been mistaken, then. He had seen the lights … and men were here. Or could he be mistaken? Those lights would have continued to function even without attention. The fact that they were shining in the building was no reason to conclude that men also were there.
At the far end of the field loomed a massive structure and West knew that it was the shops of the Alpha Centauri expedition, where men had labored for two years to make the Henderson space drive work. Somewhere, he knew, in the shadow of the star-lighted shops, was the ship itself, the Alpha Centauri, left behind when the crew had given up in despair and gone back to Earth. A ship designed to fly out to the stars, to quit the Solar System and go into the void, spanning light years as easily as an ordinary ship went from Earth to Mars.
It hadn’t gone, of course, but that didn’t matter.
“A symbol,” West said to himself.
That was what it was … a symbol and a dream.
And something, too, now that he was here, now that he could admit it, that had lain in the back of his mind all the way from Earth.
West shucked his belt around so that the pistol hung handy to his fist.
If men were here … or worse, if that message hadn’t been a phony, he might need the pistol. Although it was unlikely that the sort of thing that he then would face would be vulnerable to a pistol.
Shivering, he remembered that terse, secret report reposing in the confidential archives back on Earth … the transcription of the tense, rasping voice that had come over the radio from Pluto, a voice that told of dreadful things, of dying men and something that was loose. A voice that had screamed a warning, then had gurgled and died out.
It was after that that the ban had been put on the planet and the space patrol sent out to quarantine the place.
Mystery from the first, he thought … beginning and the end. First because the commission was seeking a hormone to effect controlled mutations in the human race. And the race would resent such a thing, of course, so it had to be a mystery.
The human race, West thought bitterly, resents anything that deviates from the norm. It used to stone the leper from the towns and it smothered its madmen in deep featherbeds and it stares at a crippled thing and its pity is a burning insult. And its fear … oh, yes, its fear!
Slowly, carefully, West made his way across the landing strip. The surface was smooth, so smooth that his space boots had little grip upon it.
On the rocky height above the field stood the laboratory, but West turned back and stared out into space, as if he might be taking final leave of someone that he knew.
Earth, he said. Earth, can you hear me now?
You need no longer fear me and you need not worry, for I shall not come back.
But the day will come when there are others like me. And there may be even now.
For you can’t tell a mutant by the way he combs his hair, nor the way he walks or talks. He sprouts no horns and he grows no tail and there’s no mark upon his forehead.
But when you spot one, you must watch him carefully. You must spy against him and set double-checks about him. And you must find a place to put him where you’ll be safe from anything he does … but you must not let him know. You must try him and sentence him and send him into exile without his ever knowing it.
Like, said West, you tried to do with me.
But, said West, talking to the Earth, I didn’t like your exile, so I chose one of my own. Because I knew, you see. I knew when you began to watch me and about the double-checks and the conferences and the plan of action and there were times when I could hardly keep from laughing in your face.
He stood for a long moment, staring into space, out where the Earth swam somewhere in darkness around the starlike Sun.
Bitter? he asked himself. And answered: No, not bitter. Not exactly bitter.
For you must understand, he said, still talking to the Earth, that a man is human first and mutant after that. He is not a monster simply because he is a mutant … he is just a little different. He is human in every way that you are human and it may be that he is human in more ways than you are. For the human race as it stands today is the history of long mutancy … of men who were a little different, who thought a little clearer, who felt a deeper compassion, who held an attribute that was more human than the rest of their fellow men. And they passed that clearer thinking and that deeper compassion on to sons and daughters and the sons and daughters passed it on to some—not all—but some of their sons and daughters. Thus the race grew up from savagery, thus the human concept grew.
Perhaps, he thought, my father was a mutant, a mutant that no one suspected. Or it may have been my mother. And neither of them would have been suspected. For my father was a farmer and if his mutancy had made the crops grow a little better through his better understanding of the soil or through a deeper feeling for the art of growing things, who would there be to know that he was a mutant? He would simply have been a better farmer than his neighbors. And if at night, when he read the well-worn books that stood on the shelf in the dining room, he understood those books and the things they meant to say better than most other men, who was there to know?
But I, he said, I was noticed. That is the crime of mutancy, to be noticed. Like the Spartan boy whose crime of stealing a fox was no crime at all, but whose cries when the fox ripped out his guts were a crime indeed.
I rose too fast, he thought. I cut through too much red tape. I understood too well. And in governmental office you can not rise too fast nor cut red tape nor understand too well. You must be as mediocre as your fellow officeholders. You cannot point to a blueprint of a rocket motor and say, “There is the trouble,” when men who are better trained than you cannot see the trouble. And you cannot devise a system of production that will turn out two rocket motors for the price of one in half the time. For that is not only being too efficient; it’s downright blasphemy.
But most of all you cannot stand up in open meeting of government policy makers and point out that mutancy is no crime in itself … that it only is a crime when it is wrongly used. Nor say that the world would be better off if it used its mutants instead of being frightened of them.
Of course, if one knew one was a mutant, one would never say a thing like that. And a mutant, knowing himself a mutant, never would point out a thing that was wrong with a rocket engine. For a mutant has to keep his mouth shut, has to act the mediocre man and arrive at the ends he wishes by complex indirection.
If I had only known, thought West. If I had only known in time. I could have fooled them, as I hope many others even now are fooling them.
But now he knew it was too late, too late to turn back to the life that he had rejected, to go back and accept the dead-end trap that had been fashioned for him … a trap that would catch and hold him, where he would be safe. And where the human race would be safe from him.
West turned around and found the path that led up the rocky decline toward the laboratory.
A hulking figure stepped out of the shadows and challenged him.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
West halted. “Just got in,” he said. “Looking for a friend of mine. By the name of Nevin.”
Inside the pocket of his suit, he felt Annabelle stirring restlessly. Probably she was getting cold.
“Nevin?” asked the man, a note of alarm chilling his voice. “What do you want of Nevin?”
“He’s got a painting,” West declared.
The man’s voice turned silky and dangerous. “How much do you know about Nevin and his painting?”
“Not much,” said West. “That’s why I’m here. Wanted to talk with him about it.”
Annabelle turned a somersault inside West’s zippered pocket. The man’s eyes caught the movement.
“What you got in there?” he demanded, suspiciously.
“Annabelle,” said West. “She’s—well, she’s something like a skinned rat, partly, with a face that’s almost human, except it’s practically all mouth.”
“You don’t say. Where did you get her?”
“Found her,” West told him.
Laughter gurgled in the man’s throat. “So you found her, eh? Can you imagine that?”
He reached out and took West by the arm.
“Maybe we’ll have a lot to talk about,” he said. “We’ll have to compare our notes.”
Together they moved up the hillside, the man’s gloved hand clutching West by the arm.
“You’re Langdon,” West hazarded, as casually as he could speak.
The man chuckled. “Not Langdon. Langdon got lost.”
“That’s tough,” commented West. “Bad place to get lost on … Pluto.”
“Not Pluto,” said the man. “Somewhere else.”
“Maybe Darling, then …” and he held his breath to hear the answer.
“Darling left us,” said the man. “I’m Cartwright. Burton Cartwright.”
On the top of the tiny plateau in front of the laboratory, they stopped to catch their breath. The dim starlight painted the valley below with silver tracery.
West pointed. “That ship!”
Cartwright chuckled. “You recognize it, eh? The Alpha Centauri.”
“They’re still working on the drive, back on Earth,” said West. “Someday they’ll get it.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Cartwright.
He swung back toward the laboratory. “Let’s go in. Dinner will be ready soon.”
The table was set with white cloth and shining silver that gleamed in the light of the flickering dinner tapers. Sparkling wine glasses stood in their proper places. The centerpiece was a bowl of fruit—but fruit such as West had never seen before.
Cartwright tilted a chair and dumped a thing that had been sleeping there onto the floor.
“Your place, Mr. West,” he said.
The thing uncoiled itself and glared at West with an eye of fishy hatred, purred with lusty venom and slithered out of sight.
Across the table Louis Nevin apologized. “The damn things keep sneaking through all the time. I suppose, Mr. West, you have trouble with them, too.”
“We tried rat traps,” said Cartwright, “but they were too smart for that. So we get along with them the best we can.”
West laughed to cover momentary confusion, but he found Nevin’s eyes upon him.
“Annabelle,” he said, “is the only one that ever bothered me.”
“You’re lucky,” Nevin told him. “They get to be pests. There is one of them that insists on sleeping with me.”
“Where’s Belden?” Cartwright asked.
“He ate early,” explained Nevin. “Said there were a few things he wanted to get done. Asked to be excused.”
He said to West, “James Belden. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”
West nodded.
He pulled back his chair, started to sit down, then jerked erect.
A woman had appeared in the doorway, a woman with violet eyes and platinum hair and wrapped in an ermine opera cloak. She moved forward and the light from the flaring tapers fell across her face. West stiffened at the sight, felt the blood run cold as ice within his veins.
For the face was not a woman’s face. It was like a furry skull, like a moth’s face that had attempted to turn human and had stuck halfway.
Down at the end of the table, Cartwright was chuckling.
“You recognize her, Mr. West?”
West clutched the back of his chair so hard that his knuckles suddenly were white.
“Of course I do,” he said. “The White Singer. But how did you bring her here?”
“So that’s what they call her back on Earth,” said Nevin.
“But her face,” insisted West. “What’s happened to her face?”
“There were two of them,” said Nevin. “One of them we sent to Earth. We had to fix her up a bit. Plastic surgery, you know.”
“She sings,” said Cartwright.
“Yes, I know,” said West. “I’ve heard her sing. Or, at least the other one … the one you sent to Earth with the made-over face. She’s driven practically everything else off the air. All the networks carry her.”
Cartwright sighed. “I should like to hear her back on Earth,” he said. “She would sing differently there, you know, than she sang here.”
“They sing,” interrupted Nevin, “only as they feel.”
“Firelight on the wall,” said Cartwright, “and she’d sing like firelight on the wall. Or the smell of lilacs in an April rain and her music would be like the perfume of lilacs and the mist of rain along the garden path.”
“We don’t have rain or lilacs here,” said Nevin and he looked, for a moment, as if he were going to weep.
Crazy, thought West. Crazy as a pair of bedbugs. Crazy as the man who’d drunk himself to death out on Pluto’s moon.
And yet, perhaps not so crazy.
“They have no mind,” said Cartwright. “That is, no mind to speak of. Just a bundle of nervous reactions, probably without the type of sensory perceptions that we have, but more than likely with other totally different sensory perceptions to make up for it. Sensitive things. Music to them is an expression of sensory impressions. They can’t help the way they sing any more than a moth can help killing himself against a candle-flame. And they’re naturally telepathic. They pick up thoughts and pass them along. Retain none of the thought, you understand, just pass it along. Like old fashioned telephone wires. Thoughts that listeners, under the spell of music, would pick up and accept.”
“And the beauty of it is,” said Nevin, “is that if a listener ever became conscious of those thoughts afterward and wondered about them, he would be convinced that they were his own, that he had had them all the time.”
“Clever, eh?” asked Cartwright.
West let out his breath. “Clever, yes. I didn’t think you fellows had it in you.”
West wanted to shiver and found he couldn’t and the shiver built up and up until it seemed his tautened nerves would snap.
Cartwright was speaking. “So our Stella is doing all right.”
“What’s that?” asked West.
“Stella. The other one of them. The one with the face.”
“Oh, I see,” said West. “I didn’t know her name was Stella. No one, in fact, knows anything about her. She suddenly appeared one night as a surprise feature on one of the networks. She was announced as a mystery singer, and then people began calling her the White Singer. She always sang in dim, blue light, you see, and no one ever saw her face too plainly, although everyone imagined, of course, that it was beautiful.
“The network made no bones about her being an alien being. She was represented as a member of a mystery race that Juston Lloyd had found in the Asteroids. You remember Lloyd, the New York press agent.”
Nevin was leaning across the table. “And the people, the government, it does not suspect?”
West shook his head. “Why should it? Your Stella is a wonder. Everyone is batty over her. The newspapers went wild. The movie people—”
“And the cults?”
“The cults,” said West, “are doing fine.”
“And you?” asked Cartwright and in the man’s rumbling voice West felt the challenge.
“I found out,” he said, “I came here to get cut in.”
“You know exactly what you are asking?”
“I do,” said West, wishing that he did.
“A new philosophy,” said Cartwright. “A new concept of life. New paths for progress. Secrets the human race never has suspected. Remaking the human civilization almost overnight.”
“And you,” said West, “right at the center, pulling all the strings.”
“So,” said Cartwright.
“I want a few to pull myself.”
Nevin held up his hand. “Just a minute, Mr. West. We would like to know just how—”
Cartwright laughed at him. “Forget it, Louis. He knew about your painting. He had Annabelle. Where do you suppose he found out?”
“But—but—” said Nevin.
“Maybe he didn’t use a painting,” Cartwright declared. “Maybe he used other methods. After all, there are others, you know. Thousands of years ago men knew of the place we found. Mu, probably. Atlantis. Some other forgotten civilization. Just the fact that West had Annabelle is enough for me. He must have been there.”
West smiled, relieved. “I used other methods,” he told them.
III
The Painting
A robot came in, wheeling a tray with steaming dishes.
“Let’s sit down,” suggested Nevin.
“Just one thing,” asked West. “How did you get Stella back to Earth? None of you could have taken her. You’d have been recognized.”
Cartwright chuckled. “Robertson,” he said. “We had one ship and he slipped out. As to the recognition, Belden is our physician. He also, if you remember, is a plastic surgeon of no mean ability.”
“He did the job,” said Nevin, “for both Robertson and Stella.”
“Nearly skinned us alive,” grumbled Cartwright, “to get enough to do the work, I’ll always think that he took more than he really needed, just for spite. He’s a moody beggar.”
Nevin changed the subject. “Shall we have Rosie sit with us?”
“Rosie?” asked West.
“Rosie is Stella’s sister. We don’t know the exact relationship, but we call her that for convenience.”
“There are times,” explained Cartwright, “when we forget her face and let her sit at the table’s head, as if she were one of us. As if she were our hostess. She looks remarkably like a woman, you know. Those wings of hers are like an ermine cape, and that platinum hair. She lends something to the table … a sort of—”
“An illusion of gentility,” said Nevin.
“Perhaps we’d better not tonight,” decided Cartwright. “Mr. West is not used to her. After he’s been here awhile—”
He stopped and looked aghast.
“We’ve forgotten something,” he announced.
He rose and strode around the table to the imitation fireplace and took down a bottle that stood on the mantelpiece—a bottle with a black silk bow tied around its neck. Ceremoniously, he set it in the center of the table, beside the bowl of fruit.
“It’s a little joke we have,” said Nevin.
“Scarcely a joke,” contradicted Cartwright.
West looked puzzled. “A bottle of whisky?”
“But a special bottle,” Cartwright said. “A very special bottle. Back in the old days we formed a last man’s club, jokingly. This bottle was to be the one the last man would drink. It made us feel so adventuresome and brave and we laughed about it while we labored to find hormones. For, you see, none of us thought it would ever come to pass.”
“But now,” said Nevin, “there are only three of us.”
“You are wrong,” Cartwright reminded him. “There are four.”
Both of them looked at West.
“Of course,” decided Nevin. “There are four of us.”
Cartwright spread the napkin in his lap. “Perhaps, Louis, we might as well let Mr. West see the painting.”
Nevin hesitated. “I’m not quite satisfied, Cartwright. …”
Cartwright clucked his tongue. “You’re too suspicious, Louis. He had the creature, didn’t he? He knew about your painting. There was only one way that he could have learned.”
Nevin considered. “I suppose you’re right,” he said.
“And if Mr. West should, by any chance, turn out to be an impostor,” said Cartwright, cheerfully, “we can always take the proper steps.”
Nevin said to West: “I hope you understand.”
“Perfectly,” said West.
“We must be very careful,” Nevin pointed out. “So few would understand.”
“So very few,” said West.
Nevin stepped across the room and pulled a cord that hung along the wall. One of the tapestries rolled smoothly back, fold on heavy fold. West, watching, held his breath at what he saw.
A tree stood in the foreground, laden with golden fruit, fruit that looked exactly like some of that in the bowl upon the table. As if someone had just stepped into the painting and picked it fresh for dinner.
Under the tree ran a path, coming up to the very edge of the canvas in such detail that even the tiny pebbles strewn upon it were clear to the eye. And from the tree the path ran back against a sweep of background, climbing into wooded hills.
For the flicker of a passing second, West could have sworn that he heard the whisper of wind in the leaves of the fruit-laden tree, that he saw the leaves tremble in the wind, that he smelled the fragrance of little flowers that bloomed along the path.
“Well, Mr. West?” Nevin asked, triumphantly.
“Why,” said West, ears still cocked for the sound of wind in leaves again. “Why, it almost seems as if one could step over and walk straight down that path.”
Nevin sucked in his breath with a sound that was neither gasp nor sigh, but somewhere in between. Down at the end of the table, Cartwright was choking on his wine, chuckling laughter bubbling out between his lips despite all his efforts to keep it bottled up.
“Nevin,” asked West, “have you ever thought of making another painting?”
“Perhaps,” said Nevin. “Why do you ask?”
West smiled. Through his brain words were drumming, words that he remembered, words a man had whispered just before he died.
“I was just thinking,” said West, “of what might happen if you should paint the wrong place sometime.”
“By Lord,” yelled Cartwright, “he’s got you there, Nevin. The exact words I’ve been telling you.”
Nevin started to rise from the table, and even as he did the rustling whisper of music filled the room. Music that relaxed Nevin’s hands from their grip upon the table’s edge, music that swept the sudden chill from between West’s shoulderblades.
Music that told of keen-toothed space and the blaze of stars. Music that had the whisper of rockets and the quietness of the void and the somber arches of eternal night.
Rosie was singing.
West sat on the edge of his bed and knew that he had been lucky to break away before there could be more questions asked. So far, he was certain, he’d answered those they asked without arousing too much suspicion, but the longer a thing like that went on the more likely a man was to make some slight mistake.
Now he would have time to think, time to try to untangle and put together some of the facts as they now appeared.
One of the minor monstrosities that infested the place climbed the bedpost and perched upon it, wrapping its long tail about it many times. It chittered at West and West looked at it and shuddered, wondering if it were making a face at him or if it really looked that way.
These slithery, chittering things … he’d heard of them somewhere before. He knew that. He’d even seen pictures of them at some time. Some other time and place, very long ago. Things like Annabelle and the creature Cartwright had dumped off the chair and the little satanic being that perched upon the bedstead.
That was funny, the thing Nevin had said about them … they keep sneaking through … not sneaking in, but through.
Nothing added up. Not even Nevin and Cartwright. For there was about them some subtle tinge of character not human in its texture.
They had been working with hormones when something had happened that occasioned the warning sent to Earth. Or had there been a warning? Had the warning been a fake? Was there something going on here the Solar government didn’t want anyone to know?
Why had they sent Stella to Earth? Why were they so pleased that she was so well received? What was it Nevin had asked … and the government, it does not suspect? Why should the government suspect? What was there for it to suspect? Just a mindless creature that sang like the bells of heaven.
That hormone business, now. Hormones did funny things to people.
I should know, said West, talking to himself.
A little faster and a little quicker. A mental shortcut here and there. And you scarcely know, yourself, that you are any different. That’s how the race develops. A mutation here and another there and in a thousand years or two a certain percentage of the race is not what the race had been a thousand years before.
Maybe it was a mutation back in the Old Stone Age who struck two flints together and made himself a fire. Maybe another mutant who dreamed up a wheel and took a stoneboat and changed it to a wagon.
Slowly, he said, it would have to be slowly. Just a little at a time. For if it were too much, if it were noticeable, the other humans would kill off each mutation as it became apparent. For the human race cannot tolerate divergence from the norm, even though mutation is the process by which the race develops.
The race doesn’t kill the mutants any more. It confines them to mental institutions or it forces them into such dead-ends of expression as art or music, or it finds nice friendly exiles for them, where they will be comfortable and have a job to do and where, the normal humans hope, they’ll never know what they are.
It’s harder to be different now, he thought, harder to be a mutant and escape detection, what with the medical boards and the psychiatrists and all the other scientific mumbo-jumbo the humans have set up to guard their peace of mind.
Five hundred years ago, thought West, they would not have found me out. Five hundred years ago I might not have realized the fact myself.
Controlled mutation? Now that was something different. That was the thing the government had in mind when it sent the commission here to Pluto, taking advantage of the cold conditions to develop hormones that might mutate the race. Hormones that might make a better race, that might develop latent talents or even add entirely new characteristics calculated to bring out the best that was in humanity.
Controlled mutations, those were all right. It was only the wild mutations that the government would fear.
What if the members of the commission had developed a hormone and tried it on themselves?
His thought stopped short, pleased with the idea, with the possible solution.
Upon the bedpost the little monstrosity fingered its mouth, slobbering gleefully.
A knock came on the door.
“Come in,” called West.
The door opened and a man came in.
“I’m Belden,” said the man. “Jim Belden. They told me you were here.”
“I’m glad to know you, Belden.”
“What’s the game?” asked Belden.
“No game,” said West.
“You got those two downstairs sold on you,” Belden said. “They think you’re another great mind that has discovered the outside.”
“So they do,” said West. “I’m very glad to know it.”
“They pointed out Annabelle to me,” said Belden. “Said that was proof you were one of us. But I recognized Annabelle. They didn’t, but I did. She’s the one that Darling took along. You got her from Darling.”
West stayed silent. There was no use in playing innocent with Belden, for Belden had guessed too close to the truth.
Belden lowered his voice. “You have the same hunch as I have. You figure Darling’s hormone is worth more than all this mummery going on downstairs. And you’re here to find it. I told Nevin that Darling’s hormone was the thing for us to find instead of messing around outside, but he didn’t think so. After we took Darling to the moon, Nevin smashed the ship’s controls. He was afraid I might get away, you see. He didn’t trust me and he couldn’t afford to let me get away.”
“I’ll trade with you,” West told him quietly.
“We’ll go to the moon in your ship and see Darling,” said Belden. “We’ll beat it out of him.”
West grinned wryly. “Darling’s dead,” he said.
“Did you search the hut?” asked Belden.
“Of course not. Why should I have searched it?”
“It’s there, then,” said Belden, grimly. “Hidden in the hut somewhere. I’ve turned this place upside down and I’m sure it isn’t here. Neither the formula nor the hormones themselves. Not unless Darling was trickier than I thought he was.”
“You know what this hormone is,” said West smoothly, trying to make it sound as if he himself might know it.
“No,” said Belden shortly. “Darling didn’t trust us. He was angry at what Nevin was trying to do. And once he made a crack that the man who had it could rule the Solar System. Darling wasn’t kidding, West. He knew more about hormones than all the rest of us put together.”
“Seems to me,” West said drily, “that you would have wanted to keep a man like that here. You certainly could have used him.”
“Nevin again,” Belden told him. “Darling wouldn’t go along with the program that Nevin planned. Even threatened to expose him if he ever had the chance. Nevin wanted to kill him, but Cartwright thought up a joke … he’s jovial, Cartwright is.”
“I’ve noticed that,” said West.
“Cartwright thought up the exile business,” Belden said. “Offered Darling any one thing he wished to take along. One thing, you understand. Just one thing. That’s where the joke came in. Cartwright expected Darling to go through agonies trying to make up his mind. But there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation. Darling took the whisky.”
“He drank himself to death,” said West.
“Darling wasn’t a drinking man,” Belden told him, sharply.
“It was suicide,” said West. “Darling took you fellows down the line, neatly, all the way. He was away ahead of you.”
A soft sound like the brushing of a bird’s wing swung West around.
Rosie was coming through the door, her wings half-raised, exposing the hideousness of the furry, splotched body beneath the furry, death’s-head face.
“No!” screamed Belden. “No! I wasn’t going to do anything. I wasn’t—”
He backed away, arms outthrust to ward off the thing that walked toward him, mouth still working, but no sound coming out.
Rosie brushed West to one side with a flip of a furry wing and then the wings spread wider and shielded Belden from West’s view. The wings clapped shut and from behind them came the muffled scream of the man. Then nothing; silence.
West’s hand dropped to the holster and his gun came sliding out. His thumb slammed down the activator and the gun purred like a well-contented cat.
The ermine of Rosie’s wings turned black and she crumpled to the floor. A sickening odor filled the room.
“Belden!” cried West. He leaped forward, kicked the charred Rosie to one side. Belden lay on the floor and West turned away retching.
For a moment West stood in indecision, then swiftly he knew what he must do.
Showdown. He had hoped that it could be put off a little longer, until he knew a little more, but the incident of Belden and Rosie had settled it. There was nothing else to do.
He strode through the door and down the winding staircase toward the darkened room below.
The painting, he saw, was lighted … lighted as if from within itself. As if the source of light lay within the painting, as if some other sun shone upon the landscape that lay upon the canvas. The picture was lighted, but the rest of the room was dark and the light did not come out of the painting, but stayed there, imprisoned in the canvas.
Something scuttled between West’s feet and scuttered down the stairs. It squeaked and its claws beat a tattoo on the steps.
As West reached the bottom of the stairway a voice came out of the darkness:
“Are you looking for something, Mr. West?”
“Yes, Cartwright,” said West. “I am looking for you.”
“You must not be too concerned with what Rosie did,” Cartwright said. “Don’t let it upset you. Belden had it coming to him for a long time. He was scarcely one of us, really, never one of us. He pretended to go along with us because it was the only way that he could save his life. And life is such a small thing to consider. Don’t you think so, Mr. West?”
IV
The Last Man
West stood silently at the bottom of the stairs. The room was too dark to see anything, but the voice was coming from somewhere near the table’s end, close to the lighted painting.
I may have to kill him, West was thinking, and I must know where he is. For the first shot has to do it, there’ll be no time for a second.
“Rosie had no mind,” the voice said out in the darkness. “That is, no mind to speak of. But she was telepathic. Her brain picked up thoughts and passed them on. And she could obey simple commands. Very simple commands. And killing a man is so simple, Mr. West.
“Rosie stood here beside me and I knew every word that you and Belden said. I did not blame you, West, for you had no way of knowing what you did. But I did blame Belden and I sent Rosie up to get him.
“There’s only one thing, West, that I hold against you. You should not have killed Rosie. That was a great mistake, West, a very great mistake.”
“It was no mistake,” said West. “I did it on purpose.”
“Take it easy, Mr. West,” said Cartwright. “Don’t do anything that might make me pull the trigger. Because I have a gun on you. Dead center on you, West, and I never miss.”
“I’ll give you odds,” said West, “that I can get you before you can pull the trigger.”
“Now, Mr. West,” said Cartwright, “let’s not get hotheaded about this. Sure, you pulled a fast one on us. You tried to muscle in and you almost sold us, although eventually we would have tripped you up. And I admire your guts. Maybe we can work it out so no one will get killed.”
“Start talking,” West told him.
“It was too bad about Rosie,” said Cartwright, “and I really hold that against you, West, for we could have used Rosie to good advantage. But after all, the work is started on the other planets and we still have Stella. Our students are well grounded … they can get along without instructions for a little while and maybe by the time we need to get in contact with them again we can find another one to replace our Rosie.”
“Quit wandering around,” said West. “Let’s hear what you have in mind.”
“Well,” said Cartwright, “we’re getting awfully short-handed. Belden’s dead and Darling’s dead and if Robertson isn’t dead by now he will be very shortly. For after he took Stella to Earth, he tried to desert, tried to run away. And that would never do, of course. He might tell folks about us and we can’t let anyone do that. For we are dead, you see. …”
He chuckled, the chuckle rolling through the darkness.
“It was a masterpiece, West, that broadcast. I was the last man alive and I told them what had happened. I told them the spacetime continuum had ruptured and things were coming through. And I gurgled … I gurgled just before I died.”
“You didn’t really die, of course,” West said, innocently.
“Hell, no. But they think I did. And they still wake up screaming, thinking how I must have died.”
Ham, thought West. Pure, unadulterated ham. A jokester who would maroon a man to die on a lonely moon. A man who held a gun in his fist while he bragged about the things he’d done … about how he had outwitted Earth.
“You see,” said Cartwright, “I had to make them believe that it really happened. I had to make it so horrible that the government would never make it public, so horrible they’d close the planet with an iron-tight ban.”
“You had to be alone,” said West.
“That’s right, West. We had to be alone.”
“Well,” said West. “You’ve almost got it now. There’s only two of you alive.”
“The two of us,” Cartwright said, “and you.”
“You forget, Cartwright,” said West. “You’re going to kill me. You’ve got a gun pointed at me and you’re all set to pull the trigger.”
“Not necessarily,” said Cartwright. “We might make a deal.”
I’ve got him now, thought West. I know exactly where he is. I can’t see him, but I know where he is. And the payoff is in a minute. It’ll be one of us or the other.
“You aren’t much use to us,” said Cartwright, “but we might need you later. You remember Langdon?”
“The one that got lost,” said West.
Cartwright chuckled. “That’s it, West. But he wasn’t lost. We gave him away. You see there was a—a—well, something, that could use him for a pet and so we made it a present of Langdon.”
He chuckled again. “Langdon didn’t like the idea too well, but what were we to do?”
“Cartwright,” West said, evenly, “I’m going for my gun.”
“What’s that—” said Cartwright, but the other words were blotted out by the hissing of his gun, firing even as he talked.
The beam hissed into the wall at the foot of the staircase, a spot that had been covered only a split second before by West’s head.
But West had dropped to a crouch almost as he spoke and now his own gun was in his fist, tilting up, solid in his hand. His thumb pressed the activator and then slid off.
Something dragged itself with heavy thumps across the floor and in the stillness between the bumps, West heard the rasp of heavy breaths.
“Damn you, West,” said Cartwright. “Damn you. …”
“It’s an old trick, Cartwright,” said West, “that business of talking to a man just before you kill him. Throwing him off guard, practically ambushing him.”
Came a sound of cloth dragging over cloth, the whistling of painful breath, the thump of knees and elbows on the floor.
Then there was silence.
And a moment later something in some far corner squeaked and ran on pattering, rat-sounding feet. Then the silence again.
The rat-feet were still, but there was another sound, a faint shout as if someone far away were shouting … from somewhere outside the building, from somewhere outside … from outside.
West crouched close against the floor, huddling there, the muzzle of the gun resting on the carpet.
Outside … outside … outside. …
The words hammered in his head.
Outside of what, he asked, but he knew the answer now. He knew where he had seen the picture of the thing that had slept in the chair and the other thing that squatted on the bedpost. And he knew the sound of chirping and of chittering and of running feet.
Outside … outside … outside. …
Outside this world, of course.
He raised his head and looked at the painting, and the tree still glowed softly with its inner light, and from within it came a sound, a faint thudding sound, the sound of running feet.
The shout came again and the man was running down the path inside the painting. A man who ran and waved his arms and shouted.
The man was Nevin.
Nevin was in the painting, running down the path, his padding feet raising little puffs of dust along the pebbled path.
West raised the pistol and his hand was trembling so that the muzzle weaved back and forth and then described a circle.
“Buck fever,” said West.
He said it through chattering teeth.
For now he knew … now he knew the answer.
He put up his other hand and grasped the wrist of the hand that held the gun and the muzzle steadied. West gritted his teeth together to stop their chattering.
His thumb went down against the activator and held it there and the flame from the gun’s muzzle spat out and mushroomed upon the painting. Mushroomed until the entire canvas was a maelstrom of blue brilliance that hissed and roared and licked with hungry tongues.
Slowly the tree ran together, as if one’s eyes might have blurred and gone slightly out of focus. The landscape dimmed and jigged and ran in little wavering lines. And through the wavering lines could be seen a twisted and distorted man whose mouth seemed open in a howl of rage. But there was no sound of howling, just the purring of the gun.
With a tired little puff the mushrooming brilliance and the painting were gone and the gun’s pencil of flame was hissing through an empty steel frame still filled with tiny glowing wires, spattering against the wall behind it.
West lifted his thumb and silence clamped down upon him, clamped down and held the room … as it held leagues of space stretching on all sides.
“No painting,” said West.
An echo seemed to run all around the room.
“No painting,” the echo said, but West knew it was no echo, just his brain clicking off endlessly the words his lips had said.
“No painting,” the echo said, but West was in some other world, some other place, some otherwhere. A machine that broke down the spacetime continuum or whatever it was that separated Man’s universe from other, stranger universes.
No wonder the fruit upon the tree had looked like the fruit upon the table. No wonder he had thought that he heard the wind in the leaves.
West stood up and moved to the wall behind him. He found a tumbler and thumbed it up and the lights came on.
In the light the smashed other-world machine was a sagging piece of wreckage. Cartwright’s body lay in the center of the room. A chittering thing ran across the floor and ducked into the dark beneath a table. A grinning face peeped out from behind a chair and squalled at West in cold-boned savagery.
And it was nothing new, for he had seen those faces before. Pictures of them in old books and in magazines that published tales of soul-shaking horror, tales of things that come from beyond, of entities that broke in from outside.
Just tales to send one shivering to bed. Just stories that should not be read at midnight. Stories that made one a little nervous when a tree squeaked in the wind outside the window or the rain walked along the shingles.
It had taken the wizardry of the Solar System’s best band of scientists to open the door that led into the world beyond.
And yet people in unknown, savage ages had talked of things like these … of goblin and incubus and imp. Perhaps men in Atlantis might have found the way, even as Nevin and Cartwright had found the way. In that long-gone day letting loose upon the world a flood of things that for ages after had lived in chimney-corner stories to chill one to the marrow.
And the pictures he had seen?
Ancestral memory, perhaps. Or a weird imaging that happened to be true. Or had the writers of those stories, the painters of those pictures. …
West shuddered from the thought.
What was it Cartwright had said? The work is started on the other planets.
The work of passing along the knowledge, the principles, the psychology of the alien things of otherwhere. Education by remote control … involuntary education. Stella, the telepathic Stella, singing back on Earth, darling of the airways. And she was an agent for these things … she passed along the knowledge and a man would think it was his own.
That was it, of course, the thing that Nevin and Cartwright had planned. Remake the world, they’d said. Sitting out on Pluto and pulling strings that would remake the world.
Superstitions once. Hard facts now. Stories once to make the blood run cold. And now—
With the source dried up, with the screen empty, with the Pluto gang wiped out, the cults would die and Stella would sing on, but there would come a time when the listeners would turn away from Stella, when her novelty wore off, when the strangeness and the alienness of her had lost their appeal.
The Solar System would go on thinking imp and incubus were no more than shuddery imagery from the days when men crouched in caves and saw a supernatural threat in every moving shadow.
But it had been a narrow squeak.
From a dark corner a thing mouthed at West in a shrill singsong of hate.
So this was it, thought West. Here he was, at the end of the Solar System’s trail, in an empty house. And it was, finally, as he had hoped it would be. No one around. A storehouse full of food. Adequate shelter. A shop where he could work. A place guarded by the patrol against unwelcome callers.
Just the place for a man who might be hiding. Just the place for a fugitive from the human race.
There were things to do … later on. Two bodies to be given burial. A screen to be cleaned up and thrown on a junk heap. A few chittering things to be hunted down and killed.
Then he could settle down.
There were robots, of course. One had brought in the dinner.
Later on, he said.
But there was something else to do … something to do immediately, if he could just remember.
He stood and looked around the room, cataloguing its contents.
Chairs, drapes, a desk, the table, the imitation fireplace. …
That was it, the fireplace.
He walked across the room to stand in front of it. Reaching up, he took down the bottle from the mantel, the bottle with the black silk bow tied around its neck. The bottle for the last man’s club.
And he was the last man, there was no doubt of it. The very last of all.
He had not been in the pact, of course, but he would carry out the pact. It was melodrama, undoubtedly, but there are times, he told himself, when a little melodrama may be excusable.
He uncorked the bottle and swung around to face the room. He raised the bottle in salute—salute to the gaping, blackened frame that had held the painting, to the dead man on the floor, to the thing that mewed in a far, dark corner.
He tried to think of a word to say, but couldn’t. And there had to be a word to say, there simply had to be.
“Mud in your eye,” he said and it wasn’t any good, but it would have to do.
He put the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and tilted back his head.
Gagging, he snatched the bottle from his lips.
It wasn’t whisky and it was awful. It was gall and vinegar and quinine, all rolled into one. It was a brew straight from the Pit. It was all the bad medicine he had taken as a boy, it was sulphur and molasses, it was castor oil, it was—
“Good God,” said Frederick West.
For suddenly he remembered the location of a knife he had lost twenty years before. He saw it where he had left it, just as plain as day.
He knew an equation he’d never known before, and what was more, he knew what it was for and how it could be used.
Unbidden, he visualized, in one comprehensive picture, just how a rocket motor worked … every detail, every piece, every control, like a chart laid out before his eyes.
He could capture and hold seven fence posts in his mental eye and four was the best any human ever had been able to see mentally before.
He whooshed out his breath to air his mouth and stared at the bottle.
Suddenly he was able to recite, word for word, the first page from a book he had read ten years ago.
“The hormones,” he whispered. “Darling’s hormones!”
Hormones that did something to his brain. Speeded it up, made it work better, made more of it work than had ever worked before. Made it think cleaner and clearer than it had ever thought before.
“Good Lord,” he said.
A head start to begin with. And now this!
The man who has it could rule the Solar System. That was what Belden had said about it.
Belden had hunted for it. Had torn this place apart. And Darling had hunted for it, too. Darling, who had thought he had it, who had played a trick on Nevin and Cartwright so he could be sure he had it, who had drank himself to death trying to find the bottle he had it in.
And all these years the hormones had been in this bottle on the mantel!
Someone else had played a trick on all of them. Langdon, maybe. Langdon, who had been given away as a pet to a thing so monstrous that even Cartwright had shrunk from naming it.
With shaking hand, West put the bottle back on the mantel, placed the cork beside it. For a moment he stood there, hands against the mantel, gripping it, staring out the vision port beside the fireplace. Staring down into the valley where a shadowy cylinder tilted upward from the rocky planet, as if striving for the stars.
The Alpha Centauri—the ship with the space drive that wouldn’t work. Something wrong … something wrong. …
A sob rose in West’s throat and his hands tightened on the mantel with a grip that hurt.
He knew what was wrong!
He had studied blueprints of the drive back on Earth.
And now it was as if the blueprints were before his eyes again, for he remembered them, each line, each symbol as if they were etched upon his brain.
He saw the trouble, the simple adjustment that would make the space drive work. Ten minutes … ten minutes would be all he needed. So simple. So simple. So simple that it seemed beyond belief it had not been found before, that all the great minds which had worked upon it should not have seen it long ago.
There had been a dream—a thing that he had not even dared to say aloud, not even to himself. A thing he had not dared even to think about.
West straightened from the mantel and faced the room again. He took the bottle and for a second time raised it in salute.
But this time he had a toast for the dead men and the thing that whimpered in the corner.
“To the stars,” he said.
And he drank without gagging.
Second Childhood
You did not die.
There was no normal way to die.
You lived as carelessly and as recklessly as you could and you hoped that you would be lucky and be accidentally killed.
You kept on living and you got tired of living.
“God, how tired a man can get of living!” Andrew Young said.
John Riggs, chairman of the immortality commission, cleared his throat.
“You realize,” he said to Andrew Young, “that this petition is a highly irregular procedure to bring to our attention.”
He picked up the sheaf of papers off the table and ruffled through them rapidly.
“There is no precedent,” he added.
“I had hoped,” said Andrew Young, “to establish precedent.”
Commissioner Stanford said, “I must admit that you have made a good case, Ancestor Young. Yet you must realize that this commission has no possible jurisdiction over the life of any person, except to see that everyone is assured of all the benefits of immortality and to work out any kinks that may show up.”
“I am well aware of that,” answered Young, “and it seems to me that my case is one of the kinks you mention.”
He stood silently, watching the faces of the members of the board. They are afraid, he thought. Every one of them. Afraid of the day they will face the thing I am facing now. They have sought an answer and there is no answer yet except the pitifully basic answer, the brutally fundamental answer that I have given them.
“My request is simple,” he told them, calmly. “I have asked for permission to discontinue life. And since suicide has been made psychologically impossible, I have asked that this commission appoint a panel of next-friends to make the necessary and somewhat distasteful arrangements to bring about the discontinuance of my life.”
“If we did,” said Riggs, “we would destroy everything we have. There is no virtue in a life of only five thousand years. No more than in a life of only a hundred years. If Man is to be immortal, he must be genuinely immortal. He cannot compromise.”
“And yet,” said Young, “my friends are gone.”
He gestured at the papers Riggs held in his hands. “I have them listed there,” he said. “Their names and when and where and how they died. Take a look at them. More than two hundred names. People of my own generation and of the generations closely following mine. Their names and the photocopies of their death certificates.”
He put both of his hands upon the table, palms flat against the table, and leaned his weight upon his arms.
“Take a look at how they died,” he said. “Every one involves accidental violence. Some of them drove their vehicles too fast and, more than likely, very recklessly. One fell off a cliff when he reached down to pick a flower that was growing on its edge. A case of deliberately poor judgment, to my mind. One got stinking drunk and took a bath and passed out in the tub. He drowned. …”
“Ancestor Young,” Riggs said sharply, “you are surely not implying these folks were suicides.”
“No,” Andrew Young said bitterly. “We abolished suicide three thousand years ago, cleared it clean out of human minds. How could they have killed themselves?”
Stanford said, peering up at Young, “I believe, sir, you sat on the board that resolved that problem.”
Andrew Young nodded. “It was after the first wave of suicides. I remember it quite well. It took years of work. We had to change human perspective, shift certain facets of human nature. We had to condition human reasoning by education and propaganda and instill a new set of moral values. I think we did a good job of it. Perhaps too good a job. Today a man can no more think of deliberately committing suicide than he could think of overthrowing our government. The very idea, the very word is repulsive, instinctively repulsive. You can come a long way, gentlemen, in three thousand years.”
He leaned across the table and tapped the sheaf of papers with a lean, tense finger.
“They didn’t kill themselves,” he said. “They did not commit suicide. They just didn’t give a damn. They were tired of living … as I am tired of living. So they lived recklessly in every way. Perhaps there always was a secret hope that they would drown while drunk or their car would hit a tree or. …”
He straightened up and faced them. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I am 5,786 years of age. I was born at Lancaster, Maine, on the planet Earth on . I have served humankind well in those fifty-seven centuries. My record is there for you to see. Boards, commissions, legislative posts, diplomatic missions. No one can say that I have shirked my duty. I submit that I have paid any debt I owe humanity … even the well-intentioned debt for a chance at immortality.”
“We wish,” said Riggs, “that you would reconsider.”
“I am a lonely man,” replied Young. “A lonely man and tired. I have no friends. There is nothing any longer that holds my interest. It is my hope that I can make you see the desirability of assuming jurisdiction in cases such as mine. Someday you may find a solution to the problem, but until that time arrives, I ask you, in the name of mercy, to give us relief from life.”
“The problem, as we see it,” said Riggs, “is to find some way to wipe out mental perspective. When a man lives as you have, sir, for fifty centuries, he has too long a memory. The memories add up to the disadvantage of present realities and prospects for the future.”
“I know,” said Young. “I remember we used to talk about that in the early days. It was one of the problems which was recognized when immortality first became practical. But we always thought that memory would erase itself, that the brain could accommodate only so many memories, that when it got full up it would dump the old ones. It hasn’t worked that way.”
He made a savage gesture. “Gentlemen, I can recall my childhood much more vividly than I recall anything that happened yesterday.”
“Memories are buried,” said Riggs, “and in the old days, when men lived no longer than a hundred years at most, it was thought those buried memories were forgotten. Life, Man told himself, is a process of forgetting. So Man wasn’t too worried over memories when he became immortal. He thought he would forget them.”
“He should have known,” argued Young. “I can remember my father, and I remember him much more intimately than I will remember you gentlemen once I leave this room. … I can remember my father telling me that, in his later years, he could recall things which happened in his childhood that had been forgotten all his younger years. And that, alone, should have tipped us off. The brain buries only the newer memories deeply … they are not available; they do not rise to bother one, because they are not sorted or oriented or correlated or whatever it is that the brain may do with them. But once they are all nicely docketed and filed, they pop up in an instant.”
Riggs nodded agreement. “There’s a lag of a good many years in the brain’s bookkeeping. We will overcome it in time.”
“We have tried,” said Stanford. “We tried conditioning, the same solution that worked with suicides. But in this, it didn’t work. For a man’s life is built upon his memories. There are certain basic memories that must remain intact. With conditioning, you could not be selective. You could not keep the structural memories and winnow out the trash. It didn’t work that way.”
“There was one machine that worked,” Riggs put in. “It got rid of memories. I don’t understand exactly how it worked, but it did the job all right. It did too good a job. It swept the mind as clean as an empty room. It didn’t leave a thing. It took all memories and it left no capacity to build a new set. A man went in a human being and came out a vegetable.”
“Suspended animation,” said Stanford, “would be a solution. If we had suspended animation. Simply stack a man away until we found the answer, then revive and recondition him.”
“Be that as it may,” Young told them, “I should like your most earnest consideration of my petition. I do not feel quite equal to waiting until you have the answer solved.”
Riggs said, harshly, “You are asking us to legalize death.”
Young nodded. “If you wish to phrase it that way. I’m asking it in the name of common decency.”
Commissioner Stanford said, “We can ill afford to lose you, Ancestor.”
Young sighed. “There is that damned attitude again. Immortality pays all debts. When a man is made immortal, he has received full compensation for everything that he may endure. I have lived longer than any man could be expected to live and still I am denied the dignity of old age. A man’s desires are few, and quickly sated, and yet he is expected to continue living with desires burned up and blown away to ash. He gets to a point where nothing has a value … even to a point where his own personal values are no more than shadows. Gentlemen, there was a time when I could not have committed murder … literally could not have forced myself to kill another man … but today I could, without a second thought. Disillusion and cynicism have crept in upon me and I have no conscience.”
“There are compensations,” Riggs said. “Your family. …”
“They get in my hair,” said Young disgustedly. “Thousands upon thousands of young squirts calling me Grandsire and Ancestor and coming to me for advice they practically never follow. I don’t know even a fraction of them and I listen to them carefully explain a relationship so tangled and trivial that it makes me yawn in their faces. It’s all new to them and so old, so damned and damnably old to me.”
“Ancestor Young,” said Stanford, “you have seen Man spread out from Earth to distant stellar systems. You have seen the human race expand from one planet to several thousand planets. You have had a part in this. Is there not some satisfaction. …”
“You’re talking in abstracts,” Young cut in. “What I am concerned about is myself … a certain specific mass of protoplasm shaped in biped form and tagged by the designation, ironic as it may seem, of Andrew Young. I have been unselfish all my life. I’ve asked little for myself. Now I am being utterly and entirely selfish and I ask that this matter be regarded as a personal problem rather than as a racial abstraction.”
“Whether you’ll admit it or not,” said Stanford, “it is more than a personal problem. It is a problem which some day must be solved for the salvation of the race.”
“That is what I am trying to impress upon you,” Young snapped. “It is a problem that you must face. Some day you will solve it, but until you do, you must make provisions for those who face the unsolved problem.”
“Wait a while,” counseled Chairman Riggs. “Who knows? Today, tomorrow.”
“Or a million years from now,” Young told him bitterly and left, a tall, vigorous-looking man whose step was swift in anger where normally it was slow with weariness and despair.
There was yet a chance, of course.
But there was little hope.
How can a man go back almost six thousand years and snare a thing he never understood?
And yet Andrew Young remembered it. Remembered it as clearly as if it had been a thing that had happened in the morning of this very day.
It was a shining thing, a bright thing, a happiness that was brand-new and fresh as a bluebird’s wing of an April morning or a shy woods flower after sudden rain.
He had been a boy and he had seen the bluebird and he had no words to say the thing he felt, but he had held up his tiny fingers and pointed and shaped his lips to coo.
Once, he thought, I had it in my very fingers and I did not have the experience to know what it was, nor the value of it. And now I know the value, but it has escaped me—it escaped me on the day that I began to think like a human being. The first adult thought pushed it just a little and the next one pushed it farther and finally it was gone entirely and I didn’t even know that it had gone.
He sat in the chair on the flagstone patio and felt the Sun upon him, filtering through the branches of trees misty with the breaking leaves of Spring.
Something else, thought Andrew Young. Something that was not human—yet. A tiny animal that had many ways to choose, many roads to walk. And, of course, I chose the wrong way. I chose the human way. But there was another way. I know there must have been. A fairy way—or a brownie way, or maybe even pixie. That sounds foolish and childish now, but it wasn’t always.
I chose the human way because I was guided into it. I was pushed and shoved, like a herded sheep.
I grew up and I lost the thing I held.
He sat and made his mind go hard and tried to analyze what it was he sought and there was no name for it. Except happiness. And happiness was a state of being, not a thing to regain and grasp.
But he could remember how it felt. With his eyes open in the present, he could remember the brightness of the day of the past, the clean-washed goodness of it, the wonder of the colors that were more brilliant than he ever since had seen—as if it were the first second after Creation and the world was still shiningly new.
It was that new, of course. It would be that new to a child.
But that didn’t explain it all.
It didn’t explain the bottomless capacity for seeing and knowing and believing in the beauty and the goodness of a clean new world. It didn’t explain the almost nonhuman elation of knowing that there were colors to see and scents to smell and soft green grass to touch.
I’m insane, Andrew Young said to himself. Insane, or going insane. But if insanity will take me back to an understanding of the strange perception I had when I was a child, and lost, I’ll take insanity.
He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes go shut and his mind drift back.
He was crouching in a corner of a garden and the leaves were drifting down from the walnut trees like a rain of saffron gold. He lifted one of the leaves and it slipped from his fingers, for his hands were chubby still and not too sure in grasping. But he tried again and he clutched it by the stem in one stubby fist and he saw that it was not just a blob of yellowness, but delicate, with many little veins. When he held it so that the Sun struck it, he imagined that he could almost see through it, the gold was spun so fine.
He crouched with the leaf clutched tightly in his hand and for a moment there was a silence that held him motionless. Then he heard the frost-loosened leaves pattering all around him, pattering as they fell, talking in little whispers as they sailed down through the air and found themselves a bed with their golden fellows.
In that moment he knew that he was one with the leaves and the whispers that they made, one with the gold and the autumn sunshine and the far blue mist upon the hill above the apple orchard.
A foot crunched stone behind him and his eyes came open and the golden leaves were gone.
“I am sorry if I disturbed you, Ancestor,” said the man. “I had an appointment for this hour, but I would not have disturbed you if I had known.”
Young stared at him reproachfully without answering.
“I am kin,” the man told him.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Andrew Young. “The Galaxy is cluttered up with descendants of mine.”
The man was very humble. “Of course, you must resent us sometimes. But we are proud of you, sir. I might almost say that we revere you. No other family—”
“I know,” interrupted Andrew Young. “No other family has any fossil quite so old as I am.”
“Nor as wise,” said the man.
Andrew Young snorted. “Cut out that nonsense. Let’s hear what you have to say and get it over with.”
The technician was harassed and worried and very frankly puzzled. But he stayed respectful, for one always was respectful to an ancestor, whoever he might be. Today there were mighty few left who had been born into a mortal world.
Not that Andrew Young looked old. He looked like all adults, a fine figure of a person in the early twenties.
The technician shifted uneasily. “But, sir, this … this. …”
“Teddy bear,” said Young.
“Yes, of course. An extinct terrestrial subspecies of animal?”
“It’s a toy,” Young told him. “A very ancient toy. All children used to have them five thousand years ago. They took them to bed.”
The technician shuddered. “A deplorable custom. Primitive.”
“Depends on the viewpoint,” said Young. “I’ve slept with them many a time. There’s a world of comfort in one, I can personally assure you.”
The technician saw that it was no use to argue. He might as well fabricate the thing and get it over with.
“I can build you a fine model, sir,” he said, trying to work up some enthusiasm. “I’ll build in a response mechanism so that it can give simple answers to certain keyed questions and, of course, I’ll fix it so it’ll walk, either on two legs or four. …”
“No,” said Andrew Young.
The technician looked surprised and hurt. “No?”
“No,” repeated Andrew Young. “I don’t want it fancied up. I want it a simple lump of make-believe. No wonder the children of today have no imagination. Modern toys entertain them with a bag of tricks that leave the young’uns no room for imagination. They couldn’t possibly think up, on their own, all the screwy things these new toys do. Built-in responses and implied consciousness and all such mechanical trivia. …”
“You just want a stuffed fabric,” said the technician, sadly, “with jointed arms and legs.”
“Precisely,” agreed Young.
“You’re sure you want fabric, sir? I could do a neater job in plastics.”
“Fabric,” Young insisted firmly, “and it must be scratchy.”
“Scratchy, sir?”
“Sure. You know. Bristly. So it scratches when you rub your face against it.”
“But no one in his right mind would want to rub his face. …”
“I would,” said Andrew Young. “I fully intend to do so.”
“As you wish, sir,” the technician answered, beaten now.
“When you get it done,” said Young, “I have some other things in mind.”
“Other things?” The technician looked wildly about, as if seeking some escape.
“A high chair,” said Young. “And a crib. And a woolly dog. And buttons.”
“Buttons?” asked the technician. “What are buttons?”
“I’ll explain it all to you,” Young told him airily. “It all is very simple.”
It seemed, when Andrew Young came into the room, that Riggs and Stanford had been expecting him, had known that he was coming and had been waiting for him.
He wasted no time on preliminaries or formalities.
They know, he told himself. They know, or they have guessed. They would be watching me. Ever since I brought in my petition, they have been watching me, wondering what I would be thinking, trying to puzzle out what I might do next. They know every move I’ve made, they know about the toys and the furniture and all the other things. And I don’t need to tell them what I plan to do.
“I need some help,” he said, and they nodded soberly, as if they had guessed he needed help.
“I want to build a house,” he explained. “A big house. Much larger than the usual house.”
Riggs said, “We’ll draw the plans for you. Do anything else that you—”
“A house,” Young went on, “about four or five times as big as the ordinary house. Four or five times normal scale, I mean. Doors twenty-five to thirty feet high and everything else in proportion.”
“Neighbors or privacy?” asked Stanford.
“Privacy,” said Young.
“We’ll take care of it,” promised Riggs. “Leave the matter of the house to us.”
Young stood for a long moment, looking at the two of them. Then he said, “I thank you, gentlemen. I thank you for your helpfulness and your understanding. But most of all I thank you for not asking any questions.”
He turned slowly and walked out of the room and they sat in silence for minutes after he was gone.
Finally, Stanford offered a deduction: “It will have to be a place that a boy would like. Woods to run in and a little stream to fish in and a field where he can fly his kites. What else could it be?”
“He’s been out ordering children’s furniture and toys,” Riggs agreed. “Stuff from five thousand years ago. The kind of things he used when he was a child. But scaled to adult size.”
“Now,” said Stanford, “he wants a house built to the same proportions. A house that will make him think or help him believe that he is a child. But will it work, Riggs? His body will not change. He cannot make it change. It will only be in his mind.”
“Illusion,” declared Riggs. “The illusion of bigness in relation to himself. To a child, creeping on the floor, a door is twenty-five to thirty feet high, relatively. Of course the child doesn’t know that. But Andrew Young does. I don’t see how he’ll overcome that.”
“At first,” suggested Stanford, “he will know that it’s illusion, but after a time, isn’t there a possibility that it will become reality so far as he’s concerned? That’s why he needs our help. So that the house will not be firmly planted in his memory as a thing that’s merely out of proportion … so that it will slide from illusion into reality without too great a strain.”
“We must keep our mouths shut.” Riggs nodded soberly. “There must be no interference. It’s a thing he must do himself … entirely by himself. Our help with the house must be the help of an unseen, silent agency. Like brownies, I think the term was that he used, we must help and be never seen. Intrusion by anyone would introduce a jarring note and would destroy illusion and that is all he has to work on. Illusion pure and simple.”
“Others have tried,” objected Stanford, pessimistic again. “Many others. With gadgets and machines. …”
“None has tried it,” said Riggs, “with the power of mind alone. With the sheer determination to wipe out five thousand years of memory.”
“That will be his stumbling block,” said Stanford. “The old, dead memories are the things he has to beat. He has to get rid of them … not just bury them, but get rid of them for good and all, forever.”
“He must do more than that,” said Riggs. “He must replace his memories with the outlook he had when he was a child. His mind must be washed out, refreshed, wiped clean and shining and made new again … ready to live another five thousand years.”
The two men sat and looked at one another and in each other’s eyes they saw a single thought—the day would come when they, too, each of them alone, would face the problem Andrew Young faced.
“We must help,” said Riggs, “in every way we can and we must keep watch and we must be ready … but Andrew Young cannot know that we are helping or that we are watching him. We must anticipate the materials and tools and the aids that he may need.”
Stanford started to speak, then hesitated, as if seeking in his mind for the proper words.
“Yes,” said Riggs. “What is it?”
“Later on,” Stanford managed to say, “much later on, toward the very end, there is a certain factor that we must supply. The one thing that he will need the most and the one thing that he cannot think about, even in advance. All the rest can be stage setting and he can still go on toward the time when it becomes reality. All the rest may be make-believe, but one thing must come as genuine or the entire effort will collapse in failure.”
Riggs nodded. “Of course. That’s something we’ll have to work out carefully.”
“If we can,” Stanford said.
The yellow button over here and the red one over there and the green one doesn’t fit, so I’ll throw it on the floor and just for the fun of it, I’ll put the pink one in my mouth and someone will find me with it and they’ll raise a ruckus because they will be afraid that I will swallow it.
And there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that I love better than a full-blown ruckus. Especially if it is over me.
“Ug,” said Andrew Young, and he swallowed the button.
He sat stiff and straight in the towering high chair and then, in a fury, swept the oversized muffin tin and its freight of buttons crashing to the floor.
For a second he felt like weeping in utter frustration and then a sense of shame crept in on him.
Big baby, he said to himself.
Crazy to be sitting in an overgrown high chair, playing with buttons and mouthing baby talk and trying to force a mind conditioned by five thousand years of life into the channels of an infant’s thoughts.
Carefully he disengaged the tray and slid it out, cautiously shinnied down the twelve-foot-high chair.
The room engulfed him, the ceiling towering far above him.
The neighbors, he told himself, no doubt thought him crazy, although none of them had said so. Come to think of it, he had not seen any of his neighbors for a long spell now.
A suspicion came into his mind. Maybe they knew what he was doing, maybe they were deliberately keeping out of his way in order not to embarrass him.
That, of course, would be what they would do if they had realized what he was about. But he had expected … he had expected … that fellow, what’s his name? … at the commission, what’s the name of that commission, anyhow? Well, anyway, he’d expected a fellow whose name he couldn’t remember from a commission the name of which he could not recall to come snooping around, wondering what he might be up to, offering to help, spoiling the whole setup, everything he’d planned.
I can’t remember, he complained to himself. I can’t remember the name of a man whose name I knew so short a time ago as yesterday. Nor the name of a commission that I knew as well as I know my name. I’m getting forgetful. I’m getting downright childish.
Childish?
Childish!
Childish and forgetful.
Good Lord, thought Andrew Young, that’s just the way I want it.
On hands and knees he scrabbled about and picked up the buttons, put them in his pocket. Then, with the muffin tin underneath his arm, he shinnied up the high chair and, seating himself comfortably, sorted out the buttons in the pan.
The green one over here in this compartment and the yellow one … oops, there she goes onto the floor. And the red one in with the blue one and this one … this one … what’s the color of this one? Color? What’s that?
What is what?
What—
“It’s almost time,” said Stanford, “and we are ready, as ready as we’ll ever be. We’ll move in when the time is right, but we can’t move in too soon. Better to be a little late than a little early. We have all the things we need. Special size diapers and—”
“Good Lord,” exclaimed Riggs, “it won’t go that far, will it?”
“It should,” said Stanford. “It should go even further to work right. He got lost yesterday. One of our men found him and led him home. He didn’t have the slightest idea where he was and he was getting pretty scared and he cried a little. He chattered about birds and flowers and he insisted that our man stay and play with him.”
Riggs chuckled softly. “Did he?”
“Oh, certainly. He came back worn to a frazzle.”
“Food?” I asked Riggs. “How is he feeding himself?”
“We see there’s a supply of stuff, cookies and such-wise, left on a low shelf, where he can get at them. One of the robots cooks up some more substantial stuff on a regular schedule and leaves it where he can find it. We have to be careful. We can’t mess around too much. We can’t intrude on him. I have a feeling he’s almost reached an actual turning point. We can’t afford to upset things now that he’s come this far.”
“The android’s ready?”
“Just about,” said Stanford.
“And the playmates?”
“Ready. They were less of a problem.”
“There’s nothing more that we can do?”
“Nothing,” Stanford said. “Just wait, that’s all. Young has carried himself this far by the sheer force of will alone. That will is gone now. He can’t consciously force himself any further back. He is more child than adult now. He’s built up a regressive momentum and the only question is whether that momentum is sufficient to carry him all the way back to actual babyhood.”
“It has to go back to that?” Riggs looked unhappy, obviously thinking of his own future. “You’re only guessing, aren’t you?”
“All the way or it simply is no good,” Stanford said dogmatically. “He has to get an absolutely fresh start. All the way or nothing.”
“And if he gets stuck halfway between? Half child, half man, what then?”
“That’s something I don’t want to think about,” Stanford said.
He had lost his favorite teddy bear and gone to hunt it in the dusk that was filled with elusive fireflies and the hush of a world quieting down for the time of sleep. The grass was drenched with dew and he felt the cold wetness of it soaking through his shoes as he went from bush to hedge to flowerbed, looking for the missing toy.
It was necessary, he told himself, that he find the nice little bear, for it was the one that slept with him and if he did not find it, he knew that it would spend a lonely and comfortless night. But at no time did he admit, even to his innermost thought, that it was he who needed the bear and not the bear who needed him.
A soaring bat swooped low and for a horrified moment, catching sight of the zooming terror, a blob of darkness in the gathering dusk, he squatted low against the ground, huddling against the sudden fear that came out of the night. Sounds of fright bubbled in his throat and now he saw the great dark garden as an unknown place, filled with lurking shadows that lay in wait for him.
He stayed cowering against the ground and tried to fight off the alien fear that growled from behind each bush and snarled in every darkened corner. But even as the fear washed over him, there was one hidden corner of his mind that knew there was no need of fear. It was as if that one area of his brain still fought against the rest of him, as if that small section of cells might know that the bat was no more than a flying bat, that the shadows in the garden were no more than absence of light.
There was a reason, he knew, why he should not be afraid—a good reason born of a certain knowledge he no longer had. And that he should have such knowledge seemed unbelievable, for he was scarcely two years old.
He tried to say it—two years old.
There was something wrong with his tongue, something the matter with the way he had to use his mouth, with the way his lips refused to shape the words he meant to say.
He tried to define the words, tried to tell himself what he meant by two years old and one moment it seemed that he knew the meaning of it and then it escaped him.
The bat came again and he huddled close against the ground, shivering as he crouched. He lifted his eyes fearfully, darting glances here and there, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the looming house and it was a place he knew as refuge.
“House,” he said, and the word was wrong, not the word itself, but the way he said it.
He ran on trembling, unsure feet and the great door loomed before him, with the latch too high to reach. But there was another way, a small swinging door built into the big door, the sort of door that is built for cats and dogs and sometimes little children. He darted through it and felt the sureness and the comfort of the house about him. The sureness and the comfort—and the loneliness.
He found his second-best teddy bear, and, picking it up, clutched it to his breast, sobbing into its scratchy back in pure relief from terror.
There is something wrong, he thought. Something dreadfully wrong. Something is as it should not be. It is not the garden or the darkened bushes or the swooping winged shape that came out of the night. It is something else, something missing, something that should be here and isn’t.
Clutching the teddy bear, he sat rigid and tried desperately to drive his mind back along the way that would tell him what was wrong. There was an answer, he was sure of that. There was an answer somewhere; at one time he had known it. At one time he had recognized the need he felt and there had been no way to supply it—and now he couldn’t even know the need, could feel it, but he could not know it.
He clutched the bear closer and huddled in the darkness, watching the moonbeam that came through a window, high above his head, and etched a square of floor in brightness.
Fascinated, he watched the moonbeam and all at once the terror faded. He dropped the bear and crawled on hands and knees, stalking the moonbeam. It did not try to get away and he reached its edge and thrust his hands into it and laughed with glee when his hands were painted by the light coming through the window.
He lifted his face and stared up at the blackness and saw the white globe of the Moon, looking at him, watching him. The Moon seemed to wink at him and he chortled joyfully.
Behind him a door creaked open and he turned clumsily around.
Someone stood in the doorway, almost filling it—a beautiful person who smiled at him. Even in the darkness he could sense the sweetness of the smile, the glory of her golden hair.
“Time to eat, Andy,” said the woman. “Eat and get a bath and then to bed.”
Andrew Young hopped joyfully on both feet, arms held out—happy and excited and contented.
“Mummy!” he cried. “Mummy … Moon!”
He swung about with a pointing finger and the woman came swiftly across the floor, knelt and put her arms around him, held him close against her. His cheek against hers, he stared up at the Moon and it was a wondrous thing, a bright and golden thing, a wonder that was shining new and fresh.
On the street outside, Stanford and Riggs stood looking up at the huge house that towered above the trees.
“She’s in there now,” said Stanford. “Everything’s quiet so it must be all right.”
Riggs said, “He was crying in the garden. He ran in terror for the house. He stopped crying about the time she must have come in.”
Stanford nodded. “I was afraid we were putting it off too long, but I don’t see now how we could have done it sooner. Any outside interference would have shattered the thing he tried to do. He had to really need her. Well, it’s all right now. The timing was just about perfect.”
“You’re sure, Stanford?”
“Sure? Certainly I am sure. We created the android and we trained her. We instilled a deep maternal sense into her personality. She knows what to do. She is almost human. She is as close as we could come to a human mother eighteen feet tall. We don’t know what Young’s mother looked like, but chances are he doesn’t either. Over the years his memory has idealized her. That’s what we did. We made an ideal mother.”
“If it only works,” said Riggs.
“It will work,” said Stanford, confidently. “Despite the shortcomings we may discover by trial and error, it will work. He’s been fighting himself all this time. Now he can quit fighting and shift responsibility. It’s enough to get him over the final hump, to place him safely and securely in the second childhood that he had to have. Now he can curl up, contented. There is someone to look after him and think for him and take care of him. He’ll probably go back just a little further … a little closer to the cradle. And that is good, for the further he goes, the more memories are erased.”
“And then?” asked Riggs worriedly.
“Then he can proceed to grow up again.”
They stood watching, silently.
In the enormous house, lights came on in the kitchen and the windows gleamed with a homey brightness.
I, too, Stanford was thinking. Some day, I, too. Young has pointed the way, he has blazed the path. He had shown us, all the other billions of us, here on Earth and all over the Galaxy, the way it can be done. There will be others and for them there will be more help. We’ll know then how to do it better.
Now we have something to work on.
Another thousand years or so, he thought, and I will go back, too. Back to the cradle and the dreams of childhood and the safe security of a mother’s arms.
It didn’t frighten him in the least.
Project Mastodon
I
The chief of protocol said, “Mr. Hudson of—ah—Mastodonia.”
The secretary of state held out his hand. “I’m glad to see you, Mr. Hudson. I understand you’ve been here several times.”
“That’s right,” said Hudson. “I had a hard time making your people believe I was in earnest.”
“And are you, Mr. Hudson?”
“Believe me, sir, I would not try to fool you.”
“And this Mastodonia,” said the secretary, reaching down to tap the document upon the desk. “You will pardon me, but I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s a new nation,” Hudson explained, “but quite legitimate. We have a constitution, a democratic form of government, duly elected officials, and a code of laws. We are a free, peace-loving people and we are possessed of a vast amount of natural resources and—”
“Please tell me, sir,” interrupted the secretary, “just where are you located?”
“Technically, you are our nearest neighbors.”
“But that is ridiculous!” exploded Protocol.
“Not at all,” insisted Hudson. “If you will give me a moment, Mr. Secretary, I have considerable evidence.”
He brushed the fingers of Protocol off his sleeve and stepped forward to the desk, laying down the portfolio he carried.
“Go ahead, Mr. Hudson,” said the secretary. “Why don’t we all sit down and be comfortable while we talk this over?”
“You have my credentials, I see. Now here is a propos—”
“I have a document signed by a certain Wesley Adams.”
“He’s our first president,” said Hudson. “Our George Washington, you might say.”
“What is the purpose of this visit, Mr. Hudson?”
“We’d like to establish diplomatic relations. We think it would be to our mutual benefit. After all, we are a sister republic in perfect sympathy with your policies and aims. We’d like to negotiate trade agreements and we’d be grateful for some Point Four aid.”
The secretary smiled. “Naturally. Who doesn’t?”
“We’re prepared to offer something in return,” Hudson told him stiffly. “For one thing, we could offer sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary!”
“I understand,” said Hudson, “that in the present state of international tensions, a foolproof sanctuary is not something to be sneezed at.”
The secretary turned stone cold. “I’m an extremely busy man.”
Protocol took Hudson firmly by the arm. “Out you go.”
General Leslie Bowers put in a call to State and got the secretary.
“I don’t like to bother you, Herb,” he said, “but there’s something I want to check. Maybe you can help me.”
“Glad to help you if I can.”
“There’s a fellow hanging around out here at the Pentagon, trying to get in to see me. Said I was the only one he’d talk to, but you know how it is.”
“I certainly do.”
“Name of Huston or Hudson or something like that.”
“He was here just an hour or so ago,” said the secretary. “Crackpot sort of fellow.”
“He’s gone now?”
“Yes. I don’t think he’ll be back.”
“Did he say where you could reach him?”
“No, I don’t believe he did.”
“How did he strike you? I mean what kind of impression did you get of him?”
“I told you. A crackpot.”
“I suppose he is. He said something to one of the colonels that got me worrying. Can’t pass up anything, you know—not in the Dirty Tricks Department. Even if it’s crackpot, these days you got to have a look at it.”
“He offered sanctuary,” said the secretary indignantly. “Can you imagine that!”
“He’s been making the rounds, I guess,” the general said. “He was over at A.E.C. Told them some sort of tale about knowing where there were vast uranium deposits. It was the A.E.C. that told me he was heading your way.”
“We get them all the time. Usually we can ease them out. This Hudson was just a little better than the most of them. He got in to see me.”
“He told the colonel something about having a plan that would enable us to establish secret bases anywhere we wished, even in the territory of potential enemies. I know it sounds crazy. …”
“Forget it, Les.”
“You’re probably right,” said the general, “but this idea sends me. Can you imagine the look on their Iron Curtain faces?”
The scared little government clerk, darting conspiratorial glances all about him, brought the portfolio to the F.B.I.
“I found it in a bar down the street,” he told the man who took him in tow. “Been going there for years. And I found this portfolio laying in the booth. I saw the man who must have left it there and I tried to find him later, but I couldn’t.”
“How do you know he left it there?”
“I just figured he did. He left the booth just as I came in and it was sort of dark in there and it took a minute to see this thing laying there. You see, I always take the same booth every day and Joe sees me come in and he brings me the usual and—”
“You saw this man leave the booth you usually sit in?”
“That’s right.”
“Then you saw the portfolio.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You tried to find the man, thinking it must have been his.”
“That’s exactly what I did.”
“But by the time you went to look for him, he had disappeared.”
“That’s the way it was.”
“Now tell me—why did you bring it here? Why didn’t you turn it in to the management so the man could come back and claim it?”
“Well, sir, it was like this. I had a drink or two and I was wondering all the time what was in that portfolio. So finally I took a peek and—”
“And what you saw decided you to bring it here to us.”
“That’s right. I saw—”
“Don’t tell me what you saw. Give me your name and address and don’t say anything about this. You understand that we’re grateful to you for thinking of us, but we’d rather you said nothing.”
“Mum’s the word,” the little clerk assured him, full of vast importance.
The F.B.I. phoned Dr. Ambrose Amberly, Smithsonian expert on paleontology.
“We’ve got something, Doctor, that we’d like you to have a look at. A lot of movie film.”
“I’ll be most happy to. I’ll come down as soon as I get clear. End of the week, perhaps?”
“This is very urgent, Doctor. Damnest thing you ever saw. Big, shaggy elephants and tigers with teeth down to their necks. There’s a beaver the size of a bear.”
“Fakes,” said Amberly, disgusted. “Clever gadgets. Camera angles.”
“That’s what we thought first, but there are no gadgets, no camera angles. This is the real McCoy.”
“I’m on my way,” the paleontologist said, hanging up.
Snide item in smug, smartaleck gossip column: Saucers are passé at the Pentagon. There’s another mystery that’s got the high brass very high.
II
President Wesley Adams and Secretary of State John Cooper sat glumly under a tree in the capital of Mastodonia and waited for the ambassador extraordinary to return.
“I tell you, Wes,” said Cooper, who, under various pseudonyms, was also the secretaries of commerce, treasury and war, “this is a crazy thing we did. What if Chuck can’t get back? They might throw him in jail or something might happen to the time unit or the helicopter. We should have gone along.”
“We had to stay,” Adams said. “You know what would happen to this camp and our supplies if we weren’t around here to guard them.”
“The only thing that’s given us any trouble is that old mastodon. If he comes around again, I’m going to take a skillet and bang him in the brisket.”
“That isn’t the only reason, either,” said President Adams, “and you know it. We can’t go deserting this nation now that we’ve created it. We have to keep possession. Just planting a flag and saying it’s ours wouldn’t be enough. We might be called upon for proof that we’ve established residence. Something like the old homestead laws, you know.”
“We’ll establish residence sure enough,” growled Secretary Cooper, “if something happens to that time unit or the helicopter.”
“You think they’ll do it, Johnny?”
“Who do what?”
“The United States. Do you think they’ll recognize us?”
“Not if they know who we are.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Chuck will talk them into it. He can talk the skin right off a cat.”
“Sometimes I think we’re going at this wrong. Sure, Chuck’s got the long-range view and I suppose it’s best. But maybe what we ought to do is grab a good, fast profit and get out of here. We could take in hunting parties at ten thousand a head or maybe we could lease it to a movie company.”
“We can do all that and do it legally and with full protection,” Cooper told him, “if we can get ourselves recognized as a sovereign nation. If we negotiate a mutual defense pact, no one would dare get hostile because we could squawk to Uncle Sam.”
“All you say is true,” Adams agreed, “but there are going to be questions. It isn’t just a matter of walking into Washington and getting recognition. They’ll want to know about us, such as our population. What if Chuck has to tell them it’s a total of three persons?”
Cooper shook his head. “He wouldn’t answer that way, Wes. He’d duck the question or give them some diplomatic double-talk. After all, how can we be sure there are only three of us? We took over the whole continent, remember.”
“You know well enough, Johnny, there are no other humans back here in North America. The farthest back any scientist will place the migrations from Asia is 30,000 years. They haven’t got here yet.”
“Maybe we should have done it differently,” mused Cooper. “Maybe we should have included the whole world in our proclamation, not just the continent. That way, we could claim quite a population.”
“It wouldn’t have held water. Even as it is, we went a little further than precedent allows. The old explorers usually laid claim to certain watersheds. They’d find a river and lay claim to all the territory drained by the river. They didn’t go grabbing off whole continents.”
“That’s because they were never sure of exactly what they had,” said Cooper. “We are. We have what you might call the advantage of hindsight.”
He leaned back against the tree and stared across the land. It was a pretty place, he thought—the rolling ridges covered by vast grazing areas and small groves, the forest-covered, ten-mile river valley. And everywhere one looked, the grazing herds of mastodon, giant bison and wild horses, with the less gregarious fauna scattered hit and miss.
Old Buster, the troublesome mastodon, a lone bull which had been probably run out of a herd by a younger rival, stood at the edge of a grove a quarter-mile away. He had his head down and was curling and uncurling his trunk in an aimless sort of way while he teetered slowly in a lazy-crazy fashion by lifting first one foot and then another.
The old cuss was lonely, Cooper told himself. That was why he hung around like a homeless dog—except that he was too big and awkward to have much pet-appeal and, more than likely, his temper was unstable.
The afternoon sun was pleasantly warm and the air, it seemed to Cooper, was the freshest he had ever smelled. It was, altogether, a very pleasant place, an Indian-summer sort of land, ideal for a Sunday picnic or a camping trip.
The breeze was just enough to float out from its flagstaff before the tent the national banner of Mastodonia—a red rampant mastodon upon a field of green.
“You know, Johnny,” said Adams, “there’s one thing that worries me a lot. If we’re going to base our claim on precedent, we may be way off base. The old explorers always claimed their discoveries for their nations or their king, never for themselves.”
“The principle was entirely different,” Cooper told him. “Nobody ever did anything for himself in those days. Everyone was always under someone else’s protection. The explorers either were financed by their governments or were sponsored by them or operated under a royal charter or a patent. With us, it’s different. Ours is a private enterprise. You dreamed up the time unit and built it. The three of us chipped in to buy the helicopter. We’ve paid all of our expenses out of our own pockets. We never got a dime from anyone. What we found is ours.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Adams uneasily.
Old Buster had moved out from the grove and was shuffling warily toward the camp. Adams picked up the rifle that lay across his knees.
“Wait,” said Cooper sharply. “Maybe he’s just bluffing. It would be a shame to plaster him; he’s such a nice old guy.”
Adams half raised the rifle.
“I’ll give him three steps more,” he announced. “I’ve had enough of him.”
Suddenly a roar burst out of the air just above their heads. The two leaped to their feet.
“It’s Chuck!” Cooper yelled. “He’s back!”
The helicopter made a half-turn of the camp and came rapidly to Earth.
Trumpeting with terror, Old Buster was a dwindling dot far down the grassy ridge.
III
They built the nightly fires circling the camp to keep out the animals.
“It’ll be the death of me yet,” said Adams wearily, “cutting all this wood.”
“We have to get to work on that stockade,” Cooper said. “We’ve fooled around too long. Some night, fire or no fire, a herd of mastodon will come busting in here and if they ever hit the helicopter, we’ll be dead ducks. It wouldn’t take more than just five seconds to turn us into Robinson Crusoes of the Pleistocene.”
“Well, now that this recognition thing has petered out on us,” said Adams, “maybe we can get down to business.”
“Trouble is,” Cooper answered, “we spent about the last of our money on the chain saw to cut this wood and on Chuck’s trip to Washington. To build a stockade, we need a tractor. We’d kill ourselves if we tried to rassle that many logs barehanded.”
“Maybe we could catch some of those horses running around out there.”
“Have you ever broken a horse?”
“No, that’s one thing I never tried.”
“Me, either. How about you, Chuck?”
“Not me,” said the ex-ambassador extraordinary bluntly.
Cooper squatted down beside the coals of the cooking fire and twirled the spit. Upon the spit were three grouse and half a dozen quail. The huge coffee pot was sending out a nose-tingling aroma. Biscuits were baking in the reflector.
“We’ve been here six weeks,” he said, “and we’re still living in a tent and cooking on an open fire. We better get busy and get something done.”
“The stockade first,” said Adams, “and that means a tractor.”
“We could use the helicopter.”
“Do you want to take the chance? That’s our getaway. Once something happens to it. …”
“I guess not,” Cooper admitted, gulping.
“We could use some of that Point Four aid right now,” commented Adams.
“They threw me out,” said Hudson. “Everywhere I went, sooner or later they got around to throwing me out. They were real organized about it.”
“Well, we tried,” Adams said.
“And to top it off,” added Hudson, “I had to go and lose all that film and now we’ll have to waste our time taking more of it. Personally, I don’t ever want to let another saber-tooth get that close to me while I hold the camera.”
“You didn’t have a thing to worry about,” Adams objected. “Johnny was right there behind you with the gun.”
“Yeah, with the muzzle about a foot from my head when he let go.”
“I stopped him, didn’t I?” demanded Cooper.
“With his head right in my lap.”
“Maybe we won’t have to take any more pictures,” Adams suggested.
“We’ll have to,” Cooper said. “There are sportsmen up ahead who’d fork over ten thousand bucks easy for two weeks of hunting here. But before we could sell them on it, we’d have to show them movies. That scene with the saber-tooth would cinch it.”
“If it didn’t scare them off,” Hudson pointed out. “The last few feet showed nothing but the inside of his throat.”
Ex-ambassador Hudson looked unhappy. “I don’t like the whole setup. As soon as we bring someone in, the news is sure to leak. And once the word gets out, there’ll be guys lying in ambush for us—maybe even nations—scheming to steal the know-how, legally or violently. That’s what scares me the most about those films I lost. Someone will find them and they may guess what it’s all about, but I’m hoping they either won’t believe it or can’t manage to trace us.”
“We could swear the hunting parties to secrecy,” said Cooper.
“How could a sportsman keep still about the mounted head of a saber-tooth or a record piece of ivory?” And the same thing would apply to anyone we approached. Some university could raise dough to send a team of scientists back here and a movie company would cough up plenty to use this place as a location for a caveman epic. But it wouldn’t be worth a thing to either of them if they couldn’t tell about it.
“Now if we could have gotten recognition as a nation, we’d have been all set. We could make our own laws and regulations and be able to enforce them. We could bring in settlers and establish trade. We could exploit our natural resources. It would all be legal and aboveboard. We could tell who we were and where we were and what we had to offer.”
“We aren’t licked yet,” said Adams. “There’s a lot that we can do. Those river hills are covered with ginseng. We can each dig a dozen pounds a day. There’s good money in the root.”
“Ginseng root,” Cooper said, “is peanuts. We need big money.”
“Or we could trap,” offered Adams. “The place is alive with beaver.”
“Have you taken a good look at those beaver? They’re about the size of a St. Bernard.”
“All the better. Think how much just one pelt would bring.”
“No dealer would believe that it was beaver. He’d think you were trying to pull a fast one on him. And there are only a few states that allow beaver to be trapped. To sell the pelts—even if you could—you’d have to take out licenses in each of those states.”
“Those mastodon carry a lot of ivory,” said Cooper. “And if we wanted to go north, we’d find mammoths that would carry even more. …”
“And get socked into the jug for ivory smuggling?”
They sat, all three of them, staring at the fire, not finding anything to say.
The moaning complaint of a giant hunting cat came from somewhere up the river.
IV
Hudson lay in his sleeping bag, staring at the sky. It bothered him a lot. There was not one familiar constellation, not one star that he could name with any certainty. This juggling of the stars, he thought, emphasized more than anything else in this ancient land the vast gulf of years which lay between him and the Earth where he had been—or would be—born.
A hundred and fifty thousand years, Adams had said, give or take ten thousand. There just was no way to know. Later on, there might be. A measurement of the stars and a comparison with their positions in the twentieth century might be one way of doing it. But at the moment, any figure could be no more than a guess.
The time machine was not something that could be tested for calibration or performance. As a matter of fact, there was no way to test it. They had not been certain, he remembered, the first time they had used it, that it would really work. There had been no way to find out. When it worked, you knew it worked. And if it hadn’t worked, there would have been no way of knowing beforehand that it wouldn’t.
Adams had been sure, of course, but that had been because he had absolute reliance in the half-mathematical, half-philosophic concepts he had worked out—concepts that neither Hudson nor Cooper could come close to understanding.
That had always been the way it had been, even when they were kids, with Wes dreaming up the deals that he and Johnny carried out. Back in those days, too, they had used time travel in their play. Out in Johnny’s back yard, they had rigged up a time machine out of a wonderful collection of salvaged junk—a wooden crate, an empty five-gallon paint pail, a battered coffee maker, a bunch of discarded copper tubing, a busted steering wheel and other odds and ends. In it, they had “traveled” back to Indian-before-the-white-man land and mammoth-land and dinosaur-land and the slaughter, he remembered, had been wonderfully appalling.
But, in reality, it had been much different. There was much more to it than gunning down the weird fauna that one found.
And they should have known there would be, for they had talked about it often.
He thought of the bull session back in university and the little, usually silent kid who sat quietly in the corner, a law-school student whose last name had been Pritchard.
And after sitting silently for some time, this Pritchard kid had spoken up: “If you guys ever do travel in time, you’ll run up against more than you bargain for. I don’t mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics.”
They all peered at him, Hudson remembered, and then had gone on with their talk. And after a short while, the talk had turned to women, as it always did.
He wondered where that quiet man might be. Some day, Hudson told himself, I’ll have to look him up and tell him he was right.
We did it wrong, he thought. There were so many other ways we might have done it, but we’d been so sure and greedy—greedy for the triumph and the glory—and now there was no easy way to collect.
On the verge of success, they could have sought out help, gone to some large industrial concern or an educational foundation or even to the government. Like historic explorers, they could have obtained subsidization and sponsorship. Then they would have had protection, funds to do a proper job and they need not have operated on their present shoestring—one beaten-up helicopter and one time unit. They could have had several and at least one standing by in the twentieth century as a rescue unit, should that be necessary.
But that would have meant a bargain, perhaps a very hard one, and sharing with someone who had contributed nothing but the money. And there was more than money in a thing like this—there were twenty years of dreams and a great idea and the dedication to that great idea—years of work and years of disappointment and an almost fanatical refusal to give up.
Even so, thought Hudson, they had figured well enough. There had been many chances to make blunders and they’d made relatively few. All they lacked, in the last analysis, was backing.
Take the helicopter, for example. It was the one satisfactory vehicle for time traveling. You had to get up in the air to clear whatever upheavals and subsidences there had been through geologic ages. The helicopter took you up and kept you clear and gave you a chance to pick a proper landing place. Travel without it and, granting you were lucky with land surfaces, you still might materialize in the heart of some great tree or end up in a swamp or the middle of a herd of startled, savage beasts. A plane would have done as well, but back in this world, you couldn’t land a plane—or you couldn’t be certain that you could. A helicopter, though, could land almost anywhere.
In the time-distance they had traveled, they almost certainly had been lucky, although one could not be entirely sure just how great a part of it was luck. Wes had felt that he had not been working as blindly as it sometimes might appear. He had calibrated the unit for jumps of 50,000 years. Finer calibration, he had said realistically, would have to wait for more developmental work.
Using the 50,000-year calibrations, they had figured it out. One jump (conceding that the calibration was correct) would have landed them at the end of the Wisconsin glacial period; two jumps, at its beginning. The third would set them down toward the end of the Sangamon Interglacial and apparently it had—give or take ten thousand years or so.
They had arrived at a time when the climate did not seem to vary greatly, either hot or cold. The flora was modern enough to give them a homelike feeling. The fauna, modern and Pleistocenic, overlapped. And the surface features were little altered from the twentieth century. The rivers ran along familiar paths, the hills and bluffs looked much the same. In this corner of the Earth, at least, 150,000 years had not changed things greatly.
Boyhood dreams, Hudson thought, were wondrous. It was not often that three men who had daydreamed in their youth could follow it out to its end. But they had and here they were.
Johnny was on watch, and it was Hudson’s turn next, and he’d better get to sleep. He closed his eyes, then opened them again for another look at the unfamiliar stars. The east, he saw, was flushed with silver light. Soon the Moon would rise, which was good. A man could keep a better watch when the Moon was up.
He woke suddenly, snatched upright and into full awareness by the marrow-chilling clamor that slashed across the night. The very air seemed curdled by the savage racket and, for a moment, he sat numbed by it. Then, slowly, it seemed—his brain took the noise and separated it into two distinct but intermingled categories, the deadly screaming of a cat and the maddened trumpeting of a mastodon.
The Moon was up and the countryside was flooded by its light. Cooper, he saw, was out beyond the watchfires, standing there and watching, with his rifle ready. Adams was scrambling out of his sleeping bag, swearing softly to himself. The cooking fire had burned down to a bed of mottled coals, but the watchfires still were burning and the helicopter, parked within their circle, picked up the glint of flames.
“It’s Buster,” Adams told him angrily. “I’d know that bellowing of his anywhere. He’s done nothing but parade up and down and bellow ever since we got here. And now he seems to have gone out and found himself a saber-tooth.”
Hudson zipped down his sleeping bag, grabbed up his rifle and jumped to his feet, following Adams in a silent rush to where Cooper stood.
Cooper motioned at them. “Don’t break it up. You’ll never see the like of it again.”
Adams brought his rifle up.
Cooper knocked the barrel down.
“You fool!” he shouted. “You want them turning on us?”
Two hundred yards away stood the mastodon and, on his back, the screeching saber-tooth. The great beast reared into the air and came down with a jolt, bucking to unseat the cat, flailing the air with his massive trunk. And as he bucked, the cat struck and struck again with his gleaming teeth, aiming for the spine.
Then the mastodon crashed head downward, as if to turn a somersault, rolled and was on his feet again, closer to them now than he had been before. The huge cat had sprung off.
For a moment, the two stood facing one another. Then the tiger charged, a flowing streak of motion in the moonlight. Buster wheeled away and the cat, leaping, hit his shoulder, clawed wildly and slid off. The mastodon whipped to the attack, tusks slashing, huge feet stamping. The cat, caught a glancing blow by one of the tusks, screamed and leaped up, to land in spread-eagle fashion upon Buster’s head.
Maddened with pain and fright, blinded by the tiger’s raking claws, the old mastodon ran—straight toward the camp. And as he ran, he grasped the cat in his trunk and tore him from his hold, lifted him high and threw him.
“Look out!” yelled Cooper and brought his rifle up and fired.
For an instant, Hudson saw it all as if it were a single scene, motionless, one frame snatched from a fantastic movie epic—the charging mastodon, with the tiger lifted and the sound track one great blast of bloodthirsty bedlam.
Then the scene dissolved in a blur of motion. He felt his rifle thud against his shoulder, knowing he had fired, but not hearing the explosion. And the mastodon was almost on top of him, bearing down like some mighty and remorseless engine of blind destruction.
He flung himself to one side and the giant brushed past him. Out of the tail of his eye, he saw the thrown saber-tooth crash to Earth within the circle of the watchfires.
He brought his rifle up again and caught the area behind Buster’s ear within his sights. He pressed the trigger. The mastodon staggered, then regained his stride and went rushing on. He hit one of the watchfires dead center and went through it, scattering coals and burning brands.
Then there was a thud and the screeching clang of metal.
“Oh, no!” shouted Hudson.
Rushing forward, they stopped inside the circle of the fires.
The helicopter lay tilted at a crazy angle. One of its rotor blades was crumpled. Half across it, as if he might have fallen as he tried to bull his mad way over it, lay the mastodon.
Something crawled across the ground toward them, its spitting, snarling mouth gaping in the firelight, its back broken, hind legs trailing.
Calmly, without a word, Adams put a bullet into the head of the saber-tooth.
V
General Leslie Bowers rose from his chair and paced up and down the room. He stopped to bang the conference table with a knotted fist.
“You can’t do it,” he bawled at them. “You can’t kill the project. I know there’s something to it. We can’t give it up!”
“But it’s been ten years, General,” said the secretary of the army. “If they were coming back, they’d be here by now.”
The general stopped his pacing, stiffened. Who did that little civilian squirt think he was, talking to the military in that tone of voice!
“We know how you feel about it, General,” said the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. “I think we all recognize how deeply you’re involved. You’ve blamed yourself all these years and there is no need of it. After all, there may be nothing to it.”
“Sir,” said the general, “I know there’s something to it. I thought so at the time, even when no one else did. And what we’ve turned up since serves to bear me out. Let’s take a look at these three men of ours. We knew almost nothing of them at the time, but we know them now. I’ve traced out their lives from the time that they were born until they disappeared—and I might add that, on the chance it might be all a hoax, we’ve searched for them for years and we’ve found no trace at all.
“I’ve talked with those who knew them and I’ve studied their scholastic and military records. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that if any three men could do it, they were the ones who could. Adams was the brains and the other two were the ones who carried out the things that he dreamed up. Cooper was a bulldog sort of man who could keep them going and it would be Hudson who would figure out the angles.
“And they knew the angles, gentlemen. They had it all doped out.
“What Hudson tried here in Washington is substantial proof of that. But even back in school, they were thinking of those angles. I talked some years ago to a lawyer in New York, name of Pritchard. He told me that even back in university, they talked of the economic and political problems that they might face if they ever cracked what they were working at.
“Wesley Adams was one of our brightest young scientific men. His record at the university and his war work bears that out. After the war, there were at least a dozen jobs he could have had. But he wasn’t interested. And I’ll tell you why he wasn’t. He had something bigger—something he wanted to work on. So he and these two others went off by themselves—”
“You think he was working on a temporal—” the army secretary cut in.
“He was working on a time machine,” roared the general. “I don’t know about this ‘temporal’ business. Just plain ‘time machine’ is good enough for me.”
“Let’s calm down, General,” said the J.C.S. chairman, “After all, there’s no need to shout.”
The general nodded. “I’m sorry, sir. I get all worked up about this. I’ve spent the last ten years with it. As you say, I’m trying to make up for what I failed to do ten years ago. I should have talked to Hudson. I was busy, sure, but not that busy. It’s an official state of mind that we’re too busy to see anyone and I plead guilty on that score. And now that you’re talking about closing the project—”
“It’s costing us money,” said the army secretary.
“And we have no direct evidence,” pointed out the J.C.S. chairman.
“I don’t know what you want,” snapped the general. “If there was any man alive who could crack time, that man was Wesley Adams. We found where he worked. We found the workshop and we talked to neighbors who said there was something funny going on and—”
“But ten years, General!” the army secretary protested.
“Hudson came here, bringing us the greatest discovery in all history, and we kicked him out. After that, do you expect them to come crawling back to us?”
“You think they went to someone else?”
“They wouldn’t do that. They know what the thing they have found would mean. They wouldn’t sell us out.”
“Hudson came with a preposterous proposition,” said the man from the state department.
“They had to protect themselves!” yelled the general. “If you had discovered a virgin planet with its natural resources intact, what would you do about it? Come trotting down here and hand it over to a government that’s too ‘busy’ to recognize—”
“General!”
“Yes, sir,” apologized the general tiredly. “I wish you gentlemen could see my view of it, how it all fits together. First there were the films and we have the word of a dozen competent paleontologists that it’s impossible to fake anything as perfect as those films. But even granting that they could be, there are certain differences that no one would ever think of faking, because no one ever knew. Who, as an example, would put lynx tassels on the ears of a saber-tooth? Who would know that young mastodon were black?
“And the location. I wonder if you’ve forgotten that we tracked down the location of Adams’ workshop from those films alone. They gave us clues so positive that we didn’t even hesitate—we drove straight to the old deserted farm where Adams and his friends had worked. Don’t you see how it all fits together?”
“I presume,” the man from the state department said nastily, “that you even have an explanation as to why they chose that particular location.”
“You thought you had me there,” said the general, “but I have an answer. A good one. The southwestern corner of Wisconsin is a geologic curiosity. It was missed by all the glaciations. Why, we do not know. Whatever the reason, the glaciers came down on both sides of it and far to the south of it and left it standing there, a little island in a sea of ice.
“And another thing: Except for a time in the Triassic, that same area of Wisconsin has always been dry land. That and a few other spots are the only areas in North America which have not, time and time again, been covered by water. I don’t think it necessary to point out the comfort it would be to an experimental traveler in time to be certain that, in almost any era he might hit, he’d have dry land beneath him.”
The economics expert spoke up: “We’ve given this matter a lot of study and, while we do not feel ourselves competent to rule upon the possibility or impossibility of time travel, there are some observations I should like, at some time, to make.”
“Go ahead right now,” said the J.C.S. chairman.
“We see one objection to the entire matter. One of the reasons, naturally, that we had some interest in it is that, if true, it would give us an entire new planet to exploit, perhaps more wisely than we’ve done in the past. But the thought occurs that any planet has only a certain grand total of natural resources. If we go into the past and exploit them, what effect will that have upon what is left of those resources for use in the present? Wouldn’t we, in doing this, be robbing ourselves of our own heritage?”
“That contention,” said the A.E.C. chairman, “wouldn’t hold true in every case. Quite the reverse, in fact. We know that there was, in some geologic ages in the past, a great deal more uranium than we have today. Go back far enough and you’d catch that uranium before it turned into lead. In southwestern Wisconsin, there is a lot of lead. Hudson told us he knew the location of vast uranium deposits and we thought he was a crackpot talking through his hat. If we’d known—let’s be fair about this—if we had known and believed him about going back in time, we’d have snapped him up at once and all this would not have happened.”
“It wouldn’t hold true with forests, either,” said the chairman of the J.C.S. “Or with pastures or with crops.”
The economics expert was slightly flushed. “There is another thing,” he said. “If we go back in time and colonize the land we find there, what would happen when that—well, let’s call it retroactive—when that retroactive civilization reaches the beginning of our historic period? What will result from that cultural collision? Will our history change? Is what has happened false? Is all—”
“That’s all poppycock!” the general shouted. “That and this other talk about using up resources. Whatever we did in the past—or are about to do—has been done already. I’ve lain awake nights, mister, thinking about all these things and there is no answer, believe me, except the one I give you. The question which faces us here is an immediate one. Do we give all this up or do we keep on watching that Wisconsin farm, waiting for them to come back? Do we keep on trying to find, independently, the process or formula or method that Adams found for traveling in time?”
“We’ve had no luck in our research so far, General,” said the quiet physicist who sat at the table’s end. “If you were not so sure and if the evidence were not so convincing that it had been done by Adams, I’d say flatly that it is impossible. We have no approach which holds any hope at all. What we’ve done so far, you might best describe as flounder. But if Adams turned the trick, it must be possible. There may be, as a matter of fact, more ways than one. We’d like to keep on trying.”
“Not one word of blame has been put on you for your failure,” the chairman told the physicist. “That you could do it seems to be more than can be humanly expected. If Adams did it—if he did, I say—it must have been simply that he blundered on an avenue of research no other man has thought of.”
“You will recall,” said the general, “that the research program, even from the first, was thought of strictly as a gamble. Our one hope was, and must remain, that they will return.”
“It would have been so much simpler all around,” the state department man said, “if Adams had patented his method.”
The general raged at him. “And had it published, all neat and orderly, in the patent office records so that anyone who wanted it could look it up and have it?”
“We can be most sincerely thankful,” said the chairman, “that he did not patent it.”
VI
The helicopter would never fly again, but the time unit was intact.
Which didn’t mean that it would work.
They held a powwow at their camp site. It had been, they decided, simpler to move the camp than to remove the body of Old Buster. So they had shifted at dawn, leaving the old mastodon still sprawled across the helicopter.
In a day or two, they knew, the great bones would be cleanly picked by the carrion birds, the lesser cats, the wolves and foxes and the little skulkers.
Getting the time unit out of the helicopter had been quite a chore, but they finally had managed and now Adams sat with it cradled in his lap.
“The worst of it,” he told them, “is that I can’t test it. There’s no way to. You turn it on and it works or it doesn’t work. You can’t know till you try.”
“That’s something we can’t help,” Cooper replied. “The problem, seems to me, is how we’re going to use it without the whirlybird.”
“We have to figure out some way to get up in the air,” said Adams. “We don’t want to take the chance of going up into the twentieth century and arriving there about six feet underground.”
“Common sense says that we should be higher here than up ahead,” Hudson pointed out. “These hills have stood here since Jurassic times. They probably were a good deal higher then and have weathered down. That weathering still should be going on. So we should be higher here than in the twentieth century—not much, perhaps, but higher.”
“Did anyone ever notice what the altimeter read?” asked Cooper.
“I don’t believe I did,” Adams admitted.
“It wouldn’t tell you, anyhow,” Hudson declared. “It would just give our height then and now—and we were moving, remember—and what about air pockets and relative atmosphere density and all the rest?”
Cooper looked as discouraged as Hudson felt.
“How does this sound?” asked Adams. “We’ll build a platform twelve feet high. That certainly should be enough to clear us and yet small enough to stay within the range of the unit’s force-field.”
“And what if we’re two feet higher here?” Hudson pointed out.
“A fall of fourteen feet wouldn’t kill a man unless he’s plain unlucky.”
“It might break some bones.”
“So it might break some bones. You want to stay here or take a chance on a broken leg?”
“All right, if you put it that way. A platform, you say. A platform out of what?”
“Timber. There’s lot of it. We just go out and cut some logs.”
“A twelve-foot log is heavy. And how are we going to get that big a log uphill?”
“We drag it.”
“We try to, you mean.”
“Maybe we could fix up a cart,” said Adams, after thinking a moment.
“Out of what?” Cooper asked.
“Rollers, maybe. We could cut some and roll the logs up here.”
“That would work on level ground,” Hudson said. “It wouldn’t work to roll a log uphill. It would get away from us. Someone might get killed.”
“The logs would have to be longer than twelve feet, anyhow,” Cooper put in. “You’d have to set them in a hole and that takes away some footage.”
“Why not the tripod principle?” Hudson offered. “Fasten three logs at the top and raise them.”
“That’s a gin-pole, a primitive derrick. It’d still have to be longer than twelve feet. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe. And how are we going to hoist three sixteen-foot logs? We’d need a block and tackle.”
“There’s another thing,” said Cooper. “Part of those logs might just be beyond the effective range of the force-field. Part of them would have to—have to, mind you—move in time and part couldn’t. That would set up a stress. …”
“Another thing about it,” added Hudson, “is that we’d travel with the logs. I don’t want to come out in another time with a bunch of logs flying all around me.”
“Cheer up,” Adams told them. “Maybe the unit won’t work, anyhow.”
VII
The general sat alone in his office and held his head between his hands. The fools, he thought, the goddam knuckle-headed fools! Why couldn’t they see it as clearly as he did?
For fifteen years now, as head of Project Mastodon, he had lived with it night and day and he could see all the possibilities as clearly as if they had been actual fact. Not military possibilities alone, although as a military man, he naturally would think of those first.
The hidden bases, for example, located within the very strongholds of potential enemies—within, yet centuries removed in time. Many centuries removed and only seconds distant.
He could see it all: The materialization of the fleets; the swift, devastating blow, then the instantaneous retreat into the fastnesses of the past. Terrific destruction, but not a ship lost nor a man.
Except that if you had the bases, you need never strike the blow. If you had the bases and let the enemy know you had them, there would never be the provocation.
And on the home front, you’d have air-raid shelters that would be effective. You’d evacuate your population not in space, but time. You’d have the sure and absolute defense against any kind of bombing—fission, fusion, bacteriological or whatever else the labs had in stock.
And if the worst should come—which it never would with a setup like that—you’d have a place to which the entire nation could retreat, leaving to the enemy the empty, blasted cities and the lethally dusted countryside.
Sanctuary—that had been what Hudson had offered the then-secretary of state fifteen years ago—and the idiot had frozen up with the insult of it and had Hudson thrown out.
And if war did not come, think of the living space and the vast new opportunities—not the least of which would be the opportunity to achieve peaceful living in a virgin world, where the old hatreds would slough off and new concepts have a chance to grow.
He wondered where they were, those three who had gone back into time. Dead, perhaps. Run down by a mastodon. Or stalked by tigers. Or maybe done in by warlike tribesmen. No, he kept forgetting there weren’t any in that era. Or trapped in time, unable to get back, condemned to exile in an alien time. Or maybe, he thought, just plain disgusted. And he couldn’t blame them if they were.
Or maybe—let’s be fantastic about this—sneaking in colonists from some place other than the watched Wisconsin farm, building up in actuality the nation they had claimed to be.
They had to get back to the present soon or Project Mastodon would be killed entirely. Already the research program had been halted and if something didn’t happen quickly, the watch that was kept on the Wisconsin farm would be called off.
“And if they do that,” said the general, “I know just what I’ll do.”
He got up and strode around the room.
“By God,” he said, “I’ll show ’em!”
VIII
It had taken ten full days of backbreaking work to build the pyramid. They’d hauled the rocks from the creek bed half a mile away and had piled them, stone by rolling stone, to the height of a full twelve feet. It took a lot of rocks and a lot of patience, for as the pyramid went up, the base naturally kept broadening out.
But now all was finally ready.
Hudson sat before the burned-out campfire and held his blistered hands before him.
It should work, he thought, better than the logs—and less dangerous.
Grab a handful of sand. Some trickled back between your fingers, but most stayed in your grasp. That was the principle of the pyramid of stones. When—and if—the time machine should work, most of the rocks would go along.
Those that didn’t go would simply trickle out and do no harm. There’d be no stress or strain to upset the working of the force-field.
And if the time unit didn’t work?
Or if it did?
This was the end of the dream, thought Hudson, no matter how you looked at it.
For even if they did get back to the twentieth century, there would be no money and with the film lost and no other taken to replace it, they’d have no proof they had traveled back beyond the dawn of history—back almost to the dawn of Man.
Although how far you traveled would have no significance. An hour or a million years would be all the same; if you could span the hour, you could span the million years. And if you could go back the million years, it was within your power to go back to the first tick of eternity, the first stir of time across the face of emptiness and nothingness—back to that initial instant when nothing as yet had happened or been planned or thought, when all the vastness of the Universe was a new slate waiting the first chalk stroke of destiny.
Another helicopter would cost thirty thousand dollars—and they didn’t even have the money to buy the tractor that they needed to build the stockade.
There was no way to borrow. You couldn’t walk into a bank and say you wanted thirty thousand to take a trip back to the Old Stone Age.
You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they’d run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.
“There’s one thing that still bothers me,” said Cooper, breaking the silence. “We spent a lot of time picking our spot so we’d miss the barn and house and all the other buildings. …”
“Don’t tell me the windmill!” Hudson cried.
“No. I’m pretty sure we’re clear of that. But the way I figure, we’re right astraddle that barbed-wire fence at the south end of the orchard.”
“If you want, we could move the pyramid over twenty feet or so.”
Cooper groaned. “I’ll take my chances with the fence.” Adams got to his feet, the time unit tucked underneath his arm. “Come on, you guys. It’s time to go.”
They climbed the pyramid gingerly and stood unsteadily at its top.
Adams shifted the unit around, clasped it to his chest.
“Stand around close,” he said, “and bend your knees a little. It may be quite a drop.”
“Go ahead,” said Cooper. “Press the button.”
Adams pressed the button.
Nothing happened.
The unit didn’t work.
IX
The chief of Central Intelligence was white-lipped when he finished talking.
“You’re sure of your information?” asked the President.
“Mr. President,” said the C.I.A. chief, “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life.”
The President looked at the other two who were in the room, a question in his eyes.
The J.C.S. chairman said, “It checks, sir, with everything we know.”
“But it’s incredible!” the President said.
“They’re afraid,” said the C.I.A. chief. “They lie awake nights. They’ve become convinced that we’re on the verge of traveling in time. They’ve tried and failed, but they think we’re near success. To their way of thinking, they’ve got to hit us now or never, because once we actually get time travel, they know their number’s up.”
“But we dropped Project Mastodon entirely almost three years ago. It’s been all of ten years since we stopped the research. It was twenty-five years ago that Hudson—”
“That makes no difference, sir. They’re convinced we dropped the project publicly, but went underground with it. That would be the kind of strategy they could understand.”
The President picked up a pencil and doodled on a pad.
“Who was that old general,” he asked, “the one who raised so much fuss when we dropped the project? I remember I was in the Senate then. He came around to see me.”
“Bowers, sir,” said the J.C.S. chairman.
“That’s right. What became of him?”
“Retired.”
“Well, I guess it doesn’t make any difference now.” He doodled some more and finally said, “Gentlemen, it looks like this is it. How much time did you say we had?”
“Not more than ninety days, sir. Maybe as little as thirty.”
The President looked up at the J.C.S. chairman.
“We’re as ready,” said the chairman, “as we will ever be. We can handle them—I think. There will, of course, be some—”
“I know,” said the President.
“Could we bluff?” asked the secretary of state, speaking quietly. “I know it wouldn’t stick, but at least we might buy some time.”
“You mean hint that we have time travel?”
The secretary nodded.
“It wouldn’t work,” said the C.I.A. chief tiredly. “If we really had it, there’d be no question then. They’d become exceedingly well-mannered, even neighborly, if they were sure we had it.”
“But we haven’t got it,” said the President gloomily.
X
The two hunters trudged homeward late in the afternoon, with a deer slung from a pole they carried on their shoulders. Their breath hung visibly in the air as they walked along, for the frost had come and any day now, they knew, there would be snow.
“I’m worried about Wes,” said Cooper, breathing heavily. “He’s taking this too hard. We got to keep an eye on him.”
“Let’s take a rest,” panted Hudson.
They halted and lowered the deer to the ground.
“He blames himself too much,” said Cooper. He wiped his sweaty forehead. “There isn’t any need to. All of us walked into this with our eyes wide open.”
“He’s kidding himself and he knows it, but it gives him something to go on. As long as he can keep busy with all his puttering around, he’ll be all right.”
“He isn’t going to repair the time unit, Chuck.”
“I know he isn’t. And he knows it, too. He hasn’t got the tools or the materials. Back in the workshop, he might have a chance, but here he hasn’t.”
“It’s rough on him.”
“It’s rough on all of us.”
“Yes, but we didn’t get a brainstorm that marooned two old friends in this tail end of nowhere. And we can’t make him swallow it when we say that it’s okay, we don’t mind at all.”
“That’s a lot to swallow, Johnny.”
“What’s going to happen to us, Chuck?”
“We’ve got ourselves a place to live and there’s lots to eat. Save our ammo for the big game—a lot of eating for each bullet—and trap the smaller animals.”
“I’m wondering what will happen when the flour and all the other stuff is gone. We don’t have too much of it because we always figured we could bring in more.”
“We’ll live on meat,” said Hudson. “We got bison by the million. The plains Indians lived on them alone. And in the spring, we’ll find roots and in the summer berries. And in the fall, we’ll harvest a half-dozen kinds of nuts.”
“Some day our ammo will be gone, no matter how careful we are with it.”
“Bows and arrows. Slingshots. Spears.”
“There’s a lot of beasts here I wouldn’t want to stand up to with nothing but a spear.”
“We won’t stand up to them. We’ll duck when we can and run when we can’t duck. Without our guns, we’re no lords of creation—not in this place. If we’re going to live, we’ll have to recognize that fact.”
“And if one of us gets sick or breaks a leg or—”
“We’ll do the best we can. Nobody lives forever.”
But they were talking around the thing that really bothered them, Hudson told himself—each of them afraid to speak the thought aloud.
They’d live, all right, so far as food, shelter and clothing were concerned. And they’d live most of the time in plenty, for this was a fat and openhanded land and a man could make an easy living.
But the big problem—the one they were afraid to talk about—was their emptiness of purpose. To live, they had to find some meaning in a world without society.
A man cast away on a desert isle could always live for hope, but here there was no hope. A Robinson Crusoe was separated from his fellow-humans by, at the most, a few thousand miles. Here they were separated by a hundred and fifty thousand years.
Wes Adams was the lucky one so far. Even playing his thousand-to-one shot, he still held tightly to a purpose, feeble as it might be—the hope that he could repair the time machine.
We don’t need to watch him now, thought Hudson. The time we’ll have to watch is when he is forced to admit he can’t fix the machine.
And both Hudson and Cooper had been kept sane enough, for there had been the cabin to be built and the winter’s supply of wood to cut and the hunting to be done.
But then there would come a time when all the chores were finished and there was nothing left to do.
“You ready to go?” asked Cooper.
“Sure. All rested now,” said Hudson.
They hoisted the pole to their shoulders and started off again.
Hudson had lain awake nights thinking of it and all the thoughts had been dead ends.
One could write a natural history of the Pleistocene, complete with photographs and sketches, and it would be a pointless thing to do, because no future scientist would ever have a chance to read it.
Or they might labor to build a memorial, a vast pyramid, perhaps, which would carry a message forward across fifteen hundred centuries, snatching with bare hands at a semblance of immortality. But if they did, they would be working against the sure and certain knowledge that it all would come to naught, for they knew in advance that no such pyramid existed in historic time.
Or they might set out to seek contemporary Man, hiking across four thousand miles of wilderness to Bering Strait and over into Asia. And having found contemporary Man cowering in his caves, they might be able to help him immeasurably along the road to his great inheritance. Except that they’d never make it and even if they did, contemporary Man undoubtedly would find some way to do them in and might eat them in the bargain.
They came out of the woods and there was the cabin, just a hundred yards away. It crouched against the hillside above the spring, with the sweep of grassland billowing beyond it to the slate-gray skyline. A trickle of smoke came up from the chimney and they saw the door was open.
“Wes oughtn’t to leave it open that way,” said Cooper. “No telling when a bear might decide to come visiting.”
“Hey, Wes!” yelled Hudson.
But there was no sign of him.
Inside the cabin, a white sheet of paper lay on the table top. Hudson snatched it up and read it, with Cooper at his shoulder.
Dear guys—I don’t want to get your hopes up again and have you disappointed. But I think I may have found the trouble. I’m going to try it out. If it doesn’t work, I’ll come back and burn this note and never say a word. But if you find the note, you’ll know it worked and I’ll be back to get you. Wes.
Hudson crumpled the note in his hand. “The crazy fool!”
“He’s gone off his rocker,” Cooper said. “He just thought. …”
The same thought struck them both and they bolted for the door. At the corner of the cabin, they skidded to a halt and stood there, staring at the ridge above them.
The pyramid of rocks they’d built two months ago was gone!
XI
The crash brought Gen. Leslie Bowers (ret.) up out of bed—about two feet out of bed—old muscles tense, white mustache bristling.
Even at his age, the general was a man of action. He flipped the covers back, swung his feet out to the floor and grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall.
Muttering, he blundered out of the bedroom, marched across the dining room and charged into the kitchen. There, beside the door, he snapped on the switch that turned on the floodlights. He practically took the door off its hinges getting to the stoop and he stood there, bare feet gripping the planks, nightshirt billowing in the wind, the shotgun poised and ready.
“What’s going on out there?” he bellowed.
There was a tremendous pile of rocks resting where he’d parked his car. One crumpled fender and a drunken headlight peeped out of the rubble.
A man was clambering carefully down the jumbled stones, making a detour to dodge the battered fender.
The general pulled back the hammer of the gun and fought to control himself.
The man reached the bottom of the pile and turned around to face him. The general saw that he was hugging something tightly to his chest.
“Mister,” the general told him, “your explanation better be a good one. That was a brand-new car. And this was the first time I was set for a night of sleep since my tooth quit aching.”
The man just stood and looked at him.
“Who in thunder are you?” roared the general.
The man walked slowly forward. He stopped at the bottom of the stoop.
“My name is Wesley Adams,” he said. “I’m—”
“Wesley Adams!” howled the general. “My God, man, where have you been all these years?”
“Well, I don’t imagine you’ll believe me, but the fact is. …”
“We’ve been waiting for you. For twenty-five long years! Or, rather, I’ve been waiting for you. Those other idiots gave up. I’ve waited right here for you, Adams, for the last three years, ever since they called off the guard.”
Adams gulped. “I’m sorry about the car. You see, it was this way. …”
The general, he saw, was beaming at him fondly.
“I had faith in you,” the general said.
He waved the shotgun by way of invitation. “Come on in. I have a call to make.”
Adams stumbled up the stairs.
“Move!” the general ordered, shivering. “On the double! You want me to catch my death of cold out here?”
Inside, he fumbled for the lights and turned them on. He laid the shotgun across the kitchen table and picked up the telephone.
“Give me the White House at Washington,” he said. “Yes, I said the White House. … The President? Naturally he’s the one I want to talk to. … Yes, it’s all right. He won’t mind my calling him.”
“Sir,” said Adams tentatively.
The general looked up. “What is it, Adams? Go ahead and say it.”
“Did you say twenty-five years?”
“That’s what I said. What were you doing all that time?”
Adams grasped the table and hung on. “But it wasn’t. …”
“Yes,” said the general to the operator. “Yes, I’ll wait.”
He held his hand over the receiver and looked inquiringly at Adams. “I imagine you’ll want the same terms as before.”
“Terms?”
“Sure. Recognition. Point Four Aid. Defense pact.”
“I suppose so,” Adams said.
“You got these saps across the barrel,” the general told him happily. “You can get anything you want. You rate it, too, after what you’ve done and the bonehead treatment you got—but especially for not selling out.”
XII
The night editor read the bulletin just off the teletype.
“Well, what do you know!” he said. “We just recognized Mastodonia.”
He looked at the copy chief.
“Where the hell is Mastodonia?” he asked.
The copy chief shrugged. “Don’t ask me. You’re the brains in this joint.”
“Well, let’s get a map for the next edition,” said the night editor.
XIII
Tabby, the saber-tooth, dabbed playfully at Cooper with his mighty paw.
Cooper kicked him in the ribs—an equally playful gesture.
Tabby snarled at him.
“Show your teeth at me, will you!” said Cooper. “Raised you from a kitten and that’s the gratitude you show. Do it just once more and I’ll belt you in the chops.”
Tabby lay down blissfully and began to wash his face.
“Some day,” warned Hudson, “that cat will miss a meal and that’s the day you’re it.”
“Gentle as a dove,” Cooper assured him. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Well, one thing about it, nothing dares to bother us with that monstrosity around.”
“Best watchdog there ever was. Got to have something to guard all this stuff we’ve got. When Wes gets back, we’ll be millionaires. All those furs and ginseng and the ivory.”
“If he gets back.”
“He’ll be back. Quit your worrying.”
“But it’s been five years,” Hudson protested.
“He’ll be back. Something happened, that’s all. He’s probably working on it right now. Could be that he messed up the time setting when he repaired the unit or it might have been knocked out of kilter when Buster hit the helicopter. That would take a while to fix. I don’t worry that he won’t come back. What I can’t figure out is why did he go and leave us?”
“I’ve told you,” Hudson said. “He was afraid it wouldn’t work.”
“There wasn’t any need to be scared of that. We never would have laughed at him.”
“No. Of course we wouldn’t.”
“Then what was he scared of?” Cooper asked.
“If the unit failed and we knew it failed, Wes was afraid we’d try to make him see how hopeless and insane it was. And he knew we’d probably convince him and then all his hope would be gone. And he wanted to hang onto that, Johnny. He wanted to hang onto his hope even when there wasn’t any left.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” said Cooper. “What counts is that he’ll come back. I can feel it in my bones.”
And here’s another case, thought Hudson, of hope begging to be allowed to go on living.
God, he thought, I wish I could be that blind!
“Wes is working on it right now,” said Cooper confidently.
XIV
He was. Not he alone, but a thousand others, working desperately, knowing that the time was short, working not alone for two men trapped in time, but for the peace they all had dreamed about—that the whole world had yearned for through the ages.
For to be of any use, it was imperative that they could zero in the time machines they meant to build as an artilleryman would zero in a battery of guns, that each time machine would take its occupants to the same instant of the past, that their operation would extend over the same period of time, to the exact second.
It was a problem of control and calibration—starting with a prototype that was calibrated, as its finest adjustment, for jumps of 50,000 years.
Project Mastodon was finally under way.
The World That Couldn’t Be
I
The tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the vua plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. The raider had been methodical; it had not wandered about haphazardly, but had done an efficient job of harvesting the first ten rows on the west side of the field. Then, having eaten its fill, it had angled off into the bush—and that had not been long ago, for the soil still trickled down into the great pug marks, sunk deep into the finely cultivated loam.
Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one of the thorn-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled with a million flashing mirrors.
Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandana from his pocket and mopped his face.
“No, mister,” pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. “You cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha.”
“The hell I don’t,” said Duncan, but he spoke in English and not the native tongue.
He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass interspersed with thickets of hula-scrub and thorn and occasional groves of trees, crisscrossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with infrequent waterholes.
It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn’t take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its pre-dawn feeding and he’d overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on.
“Dangerous,” Zikkara pointed out. “No one hunts the Cytha.”
“I do,” Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. “I hunt anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there would be nothing left.”
Jamming the bandana back into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower across his eyes against the sun.
“It might be a long chase, mister. It is the skun season now. If you were caught out there. …”
“Now listen,” Duncan told it sharply. “Before I came, you’d feast one day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place, instead of wandering all around.”
“Mister, we like all this,” said Zikkara, “but we do not hunt the Cytha.”
“If we do not hunt the Cytha, we lose all this,” Duncan pointed out. “If I don’t make a crop, I’m licked. I’ll have to go away. Then what happens to you?”
“We will grow the corn ourselves.”
“That’s a laugh,” said Duncan, “and you know it is. If I didn’t kick your backsides all day long, you wouldn’t do a lick of work. If I leave, you go back to the bush. Now let’s go and get that Cytha.”
“But it is such a little one, mister! It is such a young one! It is scarcely worth the trouble. It would be a shame to kill it.”
Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching the native closely.
It’s scared, he told himself. It’s scared dry and spitless.
“Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha has the right to eat.”
“Not from my crop,” said Duncan savagely. “You know why we grow the vua, don’t you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that medicine—need it very badly. And what is more, out there—” he swept his arm toward the sky—“out there they pay very much for it.”
“But, mister. …”
“I tell you this,” said Duncan gently, “you either dig me up a bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm.”
“No, mister!” Zikkara screamed in desperation.
“You have your choice,” Duncan told it coldly.
He plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he’d build a house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of wandering, he’d have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one lousy tribe, would call him mister.
Gavin Duncan, planter, he said to himself, and liked the sound of it. Planter on the planet Layard. But not if the Cytha came back night after night and ate the vua plants.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Zikkara was racing for the native village.
Called their bluff, Duncan informed himself with satisfaction.
He came out of the field and walked across the yard, heading for the house. One of Shotwell’s shirts was hanging on the clothesline, limp in the breathless morning.
Damn the man, thought Duncan. Out here mucking around with those stupid natives, always asking questions, always under foot. Although, to be fair about it, that was Shotwell’s job. That was what the Sociology people had sent him out to do.
Duncan came up to the shack, pushed the door open and entered. Shotwell, stripped to the waist, was at the wash bench.
Breakfast was cooking on the stove, with an elderly native acting as cook.
Duncan strode across the room and took down the heavy rifle from its peg. He slapped the action open, slapped it shut again.
Shotwell reached for a towel.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Cytha got into the field.”
“Cytha?”
“A kind of animal,” said Duncan. “It ate ten rows of vua.”
“Big? Little? What are its characteristics?”
The native began putting breakfast on the table. Duncan walked to the table, laid the rifle across one corner of it and sat down. He poured a brackish liquid out of a big stew pan into their cups.
God, he thought, what I would give for a cup of coffee.
Shotwell pulled up his chair. “You didn’t answer me. What is a Cytha like?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Duncan.
“Don’t know? But you’re going after it, looks like, and how can you hunt it if you don’t know—”
“Track it. The thing tied to the other end of the trail is sure to be the Cytha. Well find out what it’s like once we catch up to it.”
“We?”
“The natives will send up someone to do the tracking for me. Some of them are better than a dog.”
“Look, Gavin. I’ve put you to a lot of trouble and you’ve been decent with me. If I can be any help, I would like to go.”
“Two make better time than three. And we have to catch this Cytha fast or it might settle down to an endurance contest.”
“All right, then. Tell me about the Cytha.”
Duncan poured porridge gruel into his bowl, handed the pan to Shotwell. “It’s a sort of special thing. The natives are scared to death of it. You hear a lot of stories about it. Said to be unkillable. It’s always capitalized, always a proper noun. It has been reported at different times from widely scattered places.”
“No one’s ever bagged one?”
“Not that I ever heard of.” Duncan patted the rifle. “Let me get a bead on it.”
He started eating, spooning the porridge into his mouth, munching on the stale corn bread left from the night before. He drank some of the brackish beverage and shuddered.
“Some day,” he said, “I’m going to scrape together enough money to buy a pound of coffee. You’d think—”
“It’s the freight rates,” Shotwell said. “I’ll send you a pound when I go back.”
“Not at the price they’d charge to ship it out,” said Duncan. “I wouldn’t hear of it.”
They ate in silence for a time. Finally Shotwell said: “I’m getting nowhere, Gavin. The natives are willing to talk, but it all adds up to nothing.”
“I tried to tell you that. You could have saved your time.”
Shotwell shook his head stubbornly. “There’s an answer, a logical explanation. It’s easy enough to say you cannot rule out the sexual factor, but that’s exactly what has happened here on Layard. It’s easy to exclaim that a sexless animal, a sexless race, a sexless planet is impossible, but that is what we have. Somewhere there is an answer and I have to find it.”
“Now hold up a minute,” Duncan protested. “There’s no use blowing a gasket. I haven’t got the time this morning to listen to your lecture.”
“But it’s not the lack of sex that worries me entirely,” Shotwell said, “although it’s the central factor. There are subsidiary situations deriving from that central fact which are most intriguing.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Duncan, “but if you please—”
“Without sex, there is no basis for the family, and without the family there is no basis for a tribe, and yet the natives have an elaborate tribal setup, with taboos by way of regulation. Somewhere there must exist some underlying, basic unifying factor, some common loyalty, some strange relationship which spells out to brotherhood.”
“Not brotherhood,” said Duncan, chuckling. “Not even sisterhood. You must watch your terminology. The word you want is ithood.”
The door pushed open and a native walked in timidly.
“Zikkara said that mister want me,” the native told them. “I am Sipar. I can track anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans. Those are my taboos.”
“I am glad to hear that,” Duncan replied. “You have no Cytha taboo, then.”
“Cytha!” yipped the native. “Zikkara did not tell me Cytha!”
Duncan paid no attention. He got up from the table and went to the heavy chest that stood against one wall. He rummaged in it and came out with a pair of binoculars, a hunting knife and an extra drum of ammunition. At the kitchen cupboard, he rummaged once again, filling a small leather sack with a gritty powder from a can he found.
“Rockahominy,” he explained to Shotwell. “Emergency rations thought up by the primitive North American Indians. Parched corn, ground fine. It’s no feast exactly, but it keeps a man going.”
“You figure you’ll be gone that long?”
“Maybe overnight. I don’t know. Won’t stop until I get it. Can’t afford to. It could wipe me out in a few days.”
“Good hunting,” Shotwell said. “I’ll hold the fort.”
Duncan said to Sipar: “Quit sniveling and come on.”
He picked up the rifle, settled it in the crook of his arm. He kicked open the door and strode out.
Sipar followed meekly.
II
Duncan got his first shot late in the afternoon of that first day.
In the middle of the morning, two hours after they had left the farm, they had flushed the Cytha out of its bed in a thick ravine. But there had been no chance for a shot. Duncan saw no more than a huge black blur fade into the bush.
Through the bake-oven afternoon, they had followed its trail, Sipar tracking and Duncan bringing up the rear, scanning every piece of cover, with the sun-hot rifle always held at ready.
Once they had been held up for fifteen minutes while a massive donovan tramped back and forth, screaming, trying to work up its courage for attack. But after a quarter hour of showing off, it decided to behave itself and went off at a shuffling gallop.
Duncan watched it go with a lot of thankfulness. It could soak up a lot of lead, and for all its awkwardness, it was handy with its feet once it set itself in motion. Donovans had killed a lot of men in the twenty years since Earthmen had come to Layard.
With the beast gone, Duncan looked around for Sipar. He found it fast asleep beneath a hula-shrub. He kicked the native awake with something less than gentleness and they went on again.
The bush swarmed with other animals, but they had no trouble with them.
Sipar, despite its initial reluctance, had worked well at the trailing. A misplaced bunch of grass, a twig bent to one side, a displaced stone, the faintest pug mark were Sipar’s stock in trade. It worked like a lithe, well-trained hound. This bush country was its special province; here it was at home.
With the sun dropping toward the west, they had climbed a long, steep hill and as they neared the top of it, Duncan hissed at Sipar. The native looked back over its shoulder in surprise. Duncan made motions for it to stop tracking.
The native crouched and as Duncan went past it, he saw that a look of agony was twisting its face. And in the look of agony he thought he saw as well a touch of pleading and a trace of hatred. It’s scared, just like the rest of them, Duncan told himself. But what the native thought or felt had no significance; what counted was the beast ahead.
Duncan went the last few yards on his belly, pushing the gun ahead of him, the binoculars bumping on his back. Swift, vicious insects ran out of the grass and swarmed across his hands and arms and one got on his face and bit him.
He made it to the hilltop and lay there, looking at the sweep of land beyond. It was more of the same, more of the blistering, dusty slogging, more of thorn and tangled ravine and awful emptiness.
He lay motionless, watching for a hint of motion, for the fitful shadow, for any wrongness in the terrain that might be the Cytha.
But there was nothing. The land lay quiet under the declining sun. Far on the horizon, a herd of some sort of animals was grazing, but there was nothing else.
Then he saw the motion, just a flicker, on the knoll ahead—about halfway up.
He laid the rifle carefully on the ground and hitched the binoculars around. He raised them to his eyes and moved them slowly back and forth. The animal was there where he had seen the motion.
It was resting, looking back along the way that it had come, watching for the first sign of its trailers. Duncan tried to make out the size and shape, but it blended with the grass and the dun soil and he could not be sure exactly what it looked like.
He let the glasses down and now that he had located it, he could distinguish its outline with the naked eye.
His hand reached out and slid the rifle to him. He fitted it to his shoulder and wriggled his body for closer contact with the ground. The cross-hairs centered on the faint outline on the knoll and then the beast stood up.
It was not as large as he had thought it might be—perhaps a little larger than Earth lion-size, but it certainly was no lion. It was a square-set thing and black and inclined to lumpiness and it had an awkward look about it, but there were strength and ferociousness as well.
Duncan tilted the muzzle of the rifle so that the cross-hairs centered on the massive neck. He drew in a breath and held it and began the trigger squeeze.
The rifle bucked hard against his shoulder and the report hammered in his head and the beast went down. It did not lurch or fall; it simply melted down and disappeared, hidden in the grass.
“Dead center,” Duncan assured himself.
He worked the mechanism and the spent cartridge case flew out. The feeding mechanism snicked and the fresh shell clicked as it slid into the breech.
He lay for a moment, watching. And on the knoll where the thing had fallen, the grass was twitching as if the wind were blowing, only there was no wind. But despite the twitching of the grass, there was no sign of the Cytha. It did not struggle up again. It stayed where it had fallen.
Duncan got to his feet, dug out the bandana and mopped at his face. He heard the soft thud of the step behind him and turned his head. It was the tracker.
“It’s all right, Sipar,” he said. “You can quit worrying. I got it. We can go home now.”
It had been a long, hard chase, longer than he had thought it might be. But it had been successful and that was the thing that counted. For the moment, the vua crop was safe.
He tucked the bandana back into his pocket, went down the slope and started up the knoll. He reached the place where the Cytha had fallen. There were three small gouts of torn, mangled fur and flesh lying on the ground and there was nothing else.
He spun around and jerked his rifle up. Every nerve was screamingly alert. He swung his head, searching for the slightest movement, for some shape or color that was not the shape or color of the bush or grass or ground. But there was nothing. The heat droned in the hush of afternoon. There was not a breath of moving air. But there was danger—a saw-toothed sense of danger close behind his neck.
“Sipar!” he called in a tense whisper, “Watch out!”
The native stood motionless, unheeding, its eyeballs rolling up until there was only white, while the muscles stood out along its throat like straining ropes of steel.
Duncan slowly swiveled, rifle held almost at arm’s length, elbows crooked a little, ready to bring the weapon into play in a fraction of a second.
Nothing stirred. There was no more than emptiness—the emptiness of sun and molten sky, of grass and scraggy bush, of a brown-and-yellow land stretching into foreverness.
Step by step, Duncan covered the hillside and finally came back to the place where the native squatted on its heels and moaned, rocking back and forth, arms locked tightly across its chest, as if it tried to cradle itself in a sort of illusory comfort.
The Earthman walked to the place where the Cytha had fallen and picked up, one by one, the bits of bleeding flesh. They had been mangled by his bullet. They were limp and had no shape. And it was queer, he thought. In all his years of hunting, over many planets, he had never known a bullet to rip out hunks of flesh.
He dropped the bloody pieces back into the grass and wiped his hand upon his thighs. He got up a little stiffly.
He’d found no trail of blood leading through the grass, and surely an animal with a hole of that size would leave a trail.
And as he stood there upon the hillside, with the bloody fingerprints still wet and glistening upon the fabric of his trousers, he felt the first cold touch of fear, as if the fingertips of fear might momentarily, almost casually, have trailed across his heart.
He turned around and walked back to the native, reached down and shook it.
“Snap out of it,” he ordered.
He expected pleading, cowering, terror, but there was none.
Sipar got swiftly to its feet and stood looking at him and there was, he thought, an odd glitter in its eyes.
“Get going,” Duncan said. “We still have a little time. Start circling and pick up the trail. I will cover you.”
He glanced at the sun. An hour and a half still left—maybe as much as two. There might still be time to get this buttoned up before the fall of night.
A half mile beyond the knoll, Sipar picked up the trail again and they went ahead, but now they traveled more cautiously, for any bush, any rock, any clump of grass might conceal the wounded beast.
Duncan found himself on edge and cursed himself savagely for it. He’d been in tight spots before. This was nothing new to him. There was no reason to get himself tensed up. It was a deadly business, sure, but he had faced others calmly and walked away from them. It was those frontier tales he’d heard about the Cytha—the kind of superstitious chatter that one always heard on the edge of unknown land.
He gripped the rifle tighter and went on.
No animal, he told himself, was unkillable.
Half an hour before sunset, he called a halt when they reached a brackish waterhole. The light soon would be getting bad for shooting. In the morning, they’d take up the trail again, and by that time the Cytha would be at an even greater disadvantage. It would be stiff and slow and weak. It might be even dead.
Duncan gathered wood and built a fire in the lee of a thorn-bush thicket. Sipar waded out with the canteens and thrust them at arm’s length beneath the surface to fill them. The water still was warm and evil-tasting, but it was fairly free of scum and a thirsty man could drink it.
The sun went down and darkness fell quickly. They dragged more wood out of the thicket and piled it carefully close at hand.
Duncan reached into his pocket and brought out the little bag of rockahominy.
“Here,” he said to Sipar. “Supper.”
The native held one hand cupped and Duncan poured a little mound into its palm.
“Thank you, mister,” Sipar said. “Food-giver.”
“Huh?” asked Duncan, then caught what the native meant. “Dive into it,” he said, almost kindly. “It isn’t much, but it gives you strength. We’ll need strength tomorrow.”
Food-giver, eh? Trying to butter him up, perhaps. In a little while, Sipar would start whining for him to knock off the hunt and head back for the farm.
Although, come to think of it, he really was the food-giver to this bunch of sexless wonders. Corn, thank God, grew well on the red and stubborn soil of Layard—good old corn from North America. Fed to hogs, made into cornpone for breakfast back on Earth, and here, on Layard, the staple food crop for a gang of shiftless varmints who still regarded, with some good solid skepticism and round-eyed wonder, this unorthodox idea that one should take the trouble to grow plants to eat rather than go out and scrounge for them.
Corn from North America, he thought, growing side by side with the vua of Layard. And that was the way it went. Something from one planet and something from another and still something further from a third and so was built up through the wide social confederacy of space a truly cosmic culture which in the end, in another ten thousand years or so, might spell out some way of life with more sanity and understanding than was evident today.
He poured a mound of rockahominy into his own hand and put the bag back into his pocket.
“Sipar.”
“Yes, mister?”
“You were not scared today when the donovan threatened to attack us.”
“No, mister. The donovan would not hurt me.”
“I see. You said the donovan was taboo to you. Could it be that you, likewise, are taboo to the donovan?”
“Yes, mister. The donovan and I grew up together.”
“Oh, so that’s it,” said Duncan.
He put a pinch of the parched and powdered corn into his mouth and took a sip of brackish water. He chewed reflectively on the resultant mash.
He might go ahead, he knew, and ask why and how and where Sipar and the donovan had grown up together, but there was no point to it. This was exactly the kind of tangle that Shotwell was forever getting into.
Half the time, he told himself, I’m convinced the little stinkers are doing no more than pulling our legs.
What a fantastic bunch of jerks! Not men, not women, just things. And while there were never babies, there were children, although never less than eight or nine years old. And if there were no babies, where did the eight- and nine-year-olds come from?
“I suppose,” he said, “that these other things that are your taboos, the stilt-birds and the screamers and the like, also grew up with you.”
“That is right, mister.”
“Some playground that must have been,” said Duncan.
He went on chewing, staring out into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight.
“There’s something in the thorn bush, mister.”
“I didn’t hear a thing.”
“Little pattering. Something is running there.”
Duncan listened closely. What Sipar said was true. A lot of little things were running in the thicket.
“More than likely mice,” he said.
He finished his rockahominy and took an extra swig of water, gagging on it slightly.
“Get your rest,” he told Sipar. “I’ll wake you later so I can catch a wink or two.”
“Mister,” Sipar said, “I will stay with you to the end.”
“Well,” said Duncan, somewhat startled, “that is decent of you.”
“I will stay to the death,” Sipar promised earnestly.
“Don’t strain yourself,” said Duncan.
He picked up the rifle and walked down to the waterhole.
The night was quiet and the land continued to have that empty feeling. Empty except for the fire and the waterhole and the little micelike animals running in the thicket.
And Sipar—Sipar lying by the fire, curled up and sound asleep already. Naked, with not a weapon to its hand—just the naked animal, the basic humanoid, and yet with underlying purpose that at times was baffling. Scared and shivering this morning at mere mention of the Cytha, yet never faltering on the trail; in pure funk back there on the knoll where they had lost the Cytha, but now ready to go on to the death.
Duncan went back to the fire and prodded Sipar with his toe. The native came straight up out of sleep.
“Whose death?” asked Duncan. “Whose death were you talking of?”
“Why, ours, of course,” said Sipar, and went back to sleep.
III
Duncan did not see the arrow coming. He heard the swishing whistle and felt the wind of it on the right side of his throat and then it thunked into a tree behind him.
He leaped aside and dived for the cover of a tumbled mound of boulders and almost instinctively his thumb pushed the fire control of the rifle up to automatic.
He crouched behind the jumbled rocks and peered ahead. There was not a thing to see. The hula-trees shimmered in the blaze of sun and the thorn-bush was gray and lifeless and the only things astir were three stilt-birds walking gravely a quarter of a mile away.
“Sipar!” he whispered.
“Here, mister.”
“Keep low. It’s still out there.”
Whatever it might be. Still out there and waiting for another shot. Duncan shivered, remembering the feel of the arrow flying past his throat. A hell of a way for a man to die—out at the tail-end of nowhere with an arrow in his throat and a scared-stiff native heading back for home as fast as it could go.
He flicked the control on the rifle back to single fire, crawled around the rock pile and sprinted for a grove of trees that stood on higher ground. He reached them and there he flanked the spot from which the arrow must have come.
He unlimbered the binoculars and glassed the area. He still saw no sign. Whatever had taken the pot shot at them had made its getaway.
He walked back to the tree where the arrow still stood out, its point driven deep into the bark. He grasped the shaft and wrenched the arrow free.
“You can come out now,” he called to Sipar. “There’s no one around.”
The arrow was unbelievably crude. The unfeathered shaft looked as if it had been battered off to the proper length with a jagged stone. The arrowhead was unflaked flint picked up from some outcropping or dry creek bed, and it was awkwardly bound to the shaft with the tough but pliant inner bark of the hula-tree.
“You recognize this?” he asked Sipar.
The native took the arrow and examined it. “Not my tribe.”
“Of course not your tribe. Yours wouldn’t take a shot at us. Some other tribe, perhaps?”
“Very poor arrow.”
“I know that. But it could kill you just as dead as if it were a good one. Do you recognize it?”
“No tribe made this arrow,” Sipar declared.
“Child, maybe?”
“What would child do way out here?”
“That’s what I thought, too,” said Duncan.
He took the arrow back, held it between his thumbs and forefingers and twirled it slowly, with a terrifying thought nibbling at his brain. It couldn’t be. It was too fantastic. He wondered if the sun was finally getting him that he had thought of it at all.
He squatted down and dug at the ground with the makeshift arrow point. “Sipar, what do you actually know about the Cytha?”
“Nothing, mister. Scared of it is all.”
“We aren’t turning back. If there’s something that you know—something that would help us. …”
It was as close as he could come to begging aid. It was further than he had meant to go. He should not have asked at all, he thought angrily.
“I do not know,” the native said.
Duncan cast the arrow to one side and rose to his feet. He cradled the rifle in his arm. “Let’s go.”
He watched Sipar trot ahead. Crafty little stinker, he told himself. It knows more than it’s telling.
They toiled into the afternoon. It was, if possible, hotter and drier than the day before. There was a sense of tension in the air—no, that was rot. And even if there were, a man must act as if it were not there. If he let himself fall prey to every mood out in this empty land, he only had himself to blame for whatever happened to him.
The tracking was harder now. The day before, the Cytha had only run away, straight-line fleeing to keep ahead of them, to stay out of their reach. Now it was becoming tricky. It backtracked often in an attempt to throw them off. Twice in the afternoon, the trail blanked out entirely and it was only after long searching that Sipar picked it up again—in one instance, a mile away from where it had vanished in thin air.
That vanishing bothered Duncan more than he would admit. Trails do not disappear entirely, not when the terrain remains the same, not when the weather is unchanged. Something was going on, something, perhaps, that Sipar knew far more about than it was willing to divulge.
He watched the native closely and there seemed nothing suspicious. It continued at its work. It was, for all to see, the good and faithful hound.
Late in the afternoon, the plain on which they had been traveling suddenly dropped away. They stood poised on the brink of a great escarpment and looked far out to great tangled forests and a flowing river.
It was like suddenly coming into another and beautiful room that one had not expected.
This was new land, never seen before by any Earthman. For no one had ever mentioned that somewhere to the west a forest lay beyond the bush. Men coming in from space had seen it, probably, but only as a different color-marking on the planet. To them, it made no difference.
But to the men who lived on Layard, to the planter and the trader, the prospector and the hunter, it was important. And I, thought Duncan with a sense of triumph, am the man who found it.
“Mister!”
“Now what?”
“Out there. Skun!”
“I don’t—”
“Out there, mister. Across the river.”
Duncan saw it then—a haze in the blueness of the rift—a puff of copper moving very fast, and as he watched, he heard the far-off keening of the storm, a shiver in the air rather than a sound.
He watched in fascination as it moved along the river and saw the boiling fury it made out of the forest. It struck and crossed the river, and the river for a moment seemed to stand on end, with a sheet of silvery water splashed toward the sky.
Then it was gone as quickly as it had happened, but there was a tumbled slash across the forest where the churning winds had traveled.
Back at the farm, Zikkara had warned him of the skun. This was the season for them, it had said, and a man caught in one wouldn’t have a chance.
Duncan let his breath out slowly.
“Bad,” said Sipar.
“Yes, very bad.”
“Hit fast. No warning.”
“What about the trail?” asked Duncan. “Did the Cytha—”
Sipar nodded downward.
“Can we make it before nightfall?”
“I think so,” Sipar answered.
It was rougher than they had thought. Twice they went down blind trails that pinched off, with sheer rock faces opening out into drops of hundreds of feet, and were forced to climb again and find another way.
They reached the bottom of the escarpment as the brief twilight closed in and they hurried to gather firewood. There was no water, but a little was still left in their canteens and they made do with that.
After their scant meal of rockahominy, Sipar rolled himself into a ball and went to sleep immediately.
Duncan sat with his back against a boulder which one day, long ago, had fallen from the slope above them, but was now half buried in the soil that through the ages had kept sifting down.
Two days gone, he told himself.
Was there, after all, some truth in the whispered tales that made the rounds back at the settlements—that no one should waste his time in tracking down a Cytha, since a Cytha was unkillable?
Nonsense, he told himself. And yet the hunt had toughened, the trail become more difficult, the Cytha a much more cunning and elusive quarry. Where it had run from them the day before, now it fought to shake them off. And if it did that the second day, why had it not tried to throw them off the first? And what about the third day—tomorrow?
He shook his head. It seemed incredible that an animal would become more formidable as the hunt progressed. But that seemed to be exactly what had happened. More spooked, perhaps, more frightened—only the Cytha did not act like a frightened beast. It was acting like an animal that was gaining savvy and determination, and that was somehow frightening.
From far off to the west, toward the forest and the river, came the laughter and the howling of a pack of screamers. Duncan leaned his rifle against the boulder and got up to pile more wood on the fire. He stared out into the western darkness, listening to the racket. He made a wry face and pushed a hand absentmindedly through his hair. He put out a silent hope that the screamers would decide to keep their distance. They were something a man could do without.
Behind him, a pebble came bumping down the slope. It thudded to a rest just short of the fire.
Duncan spun around. Foolish thing to do, he thought, to camp so near the slope. If something big should start to move, they’d be out of luck.
He stood and listened. The night was quiet. Even the screamers had shut up for the moment. Just one rolling rock and he had his hackles up. He’d have to get himself in hand.
He went back to the boulder, and as he stooped to pick up the rifle, he heard the faint beginning of a rumble. He straightened swiftly to face the scarp that blotted out the star-strewn sky—and the rumble grew!
In one leap, he was at Sipar’s side. He reached down and grasped the native by an arm, jerked it erect, held it on its feet. Sipar’s eyes snapped open, blinking in the firelight.
The rumble had grown to a roar and there were thumping noises, as of heavy boulders bouncing, and beneath the roar the silky, ominous rustle of sliding soil and rock.
Sipar jerked its arm free of Duncan’s grip and plunged into the darkness. Duncan whirled and followed.
They ran, stumbling in the dark, and behind them the roar of the sliding, bouncing rock became a throaty roll of thunder that filled the night from brim to brim. As he ran, Duncan could feel, in dread anticipation, the gusty breath of hurtling debris blowing on his neck, the crushing impact of a boulder smashing into him, the engulfing flood of tumbling talus snatching at his legs.
A puff of billowing dust came out and caught them and they ran choking as well as stumbling. Off to the left of them, a mighty chunk of rock chugged along the ground in jerky, almost reluctant fashion.
Then the thunder stopped and all one could hear was the small slitherings of the lesser debris as it trickled down the slope.
Duncan stopped running and slowly turned around. The campfire was gone, buried, no doubt, beneath tons of overlay, and the stars had paled because of the great cloud of dust which still billowed up into the sky.
He heard Sipar moving near him and reached out a hand, searching for the tracker, not knowing exactly where it was. He found the native, grasped it by the shoulder and pulled it up beside him.
Sipar was shivering.
“It’s all right,” said Duncan.
And it was all right, he reassured himself. He still had the rifle. The extra drum of ammunition and the knife were on his belt, the bag of rockahominy in his pocket. The canteens were all they had lost—the canteens and the fire.
“We’ll have to hole up somewhere for the night,” Duncan said. “There are screamers on the loose.”
He didn’t like what he was thinking, nor the sharp edge of fear that was beginning to crowd in upon him. He tried to shrug it off, but it still stayed with him, just out of reach.
Sipar plucked at his elbow.
“Thorn thicket, mister. Over there. We could crawl inside. We would be safe from screamers.”
It was torture, but they made it.
“Screamers and you are taboo,” said Duncan, suddenly remembering. “How come you are afraid of them?”
“Afraid for you, mister, mostly. Afraid for myself just a little. Screamers could forget. They might not recognize me until too late. Safer here.”
“I agree with you,” said Duncan.
The screamers came and padded all about the thicket. The beasts sniffed and clawed at the thorns to reach them, but finally went away.
When morning came, Duncan and Sipar climbed the scarp, clambering over the boulders and the tons of soil and rock that covered their camping place. Following the gash cut by the slide, they clambered up the slope and finally reached the point of the slide’s beginning.
There they found the depression in which the poised slab of rock had rested and where the supporting soil had been dug away so that it could be started, with a push, down the slope above the campfire.
And all about were the deeply sunken pug marks of the Cytha!
IV
Now it was more than just a hunt. It was knife against the throat, kill or be killed. Now there was no stopping, when before there might have been. It was no longer sport and there was no mercy.
“And that’s the way I like it,” Duncan told himself.
He rubbed his hand along the rifle barrel and saw the metallic glints shine in the noonday sun. One more shot, he prayed. Just give me one more shot at it. This time there will be no slip-up. This time there will be more than three sodden hunks of flesh and fur lying in the grass to mock me.
He squinted his eyes against the heat shimmer rising from the river, watching Sipar hunkered beside the water’s edge.
The native rose to its feet and trotted back to him.
“It crossed,” said Sipar. “It walked out as far as it could go and it must have swum.”
“Are you sure? It might have waded out to make us think it crossed, then doubled back again.”
He stared at the purple-green of the trees across the river. Inside that forest, it would be hellish going.
“We can look,” said Sipar.
“Good. You go downstream. I’ll go up.”
An hour later, they were back. They had found no tracks. There seemed little doubt the Cytha had really crossed the river.
They stood side by side, looking at the forest.
“Mister, we have come far. You are brave to hunt the Cytha. You have no fear of death.”
“The fear of death,” Duncan said, “is entirely infantile. And it’s beside the point as well. I do not intend to die.”
They waded out into the stream. The bottom shelved gradually and they had to swim no more than a hundred yards or so.
They reached the forest bank and threw themselves flat to rest.
Duncan looked back the way that they had come. To the east, the escarpment was a dark-blue smudge against the pale-blue burnished sky. And two days back of that lay the farm and the vua field, but they seemed much farther off than that. They were lost in time and distance; they belonged to another existence and another world.
All his life, it seemed to him, had faded and become inconsequential and forgotten, as if this moment in his life were the only one that counted; as if all the minutes and the hours, all the breaths and heartbeats, wake and sleep, had pointed toward this certain hour upon this certain stream, with the rifle molded to his hand and the cool, calculated bloodlust of a killer riding in his brain.
Sipar finally got up and began to range along the stream. Duncan sat up and watched.
Scared to death, he thought, and yet it stayed with me. At the campfire that first night, it had said it would stick to the death and apparently it had meant exactly what it said. It’s hard, he thought, to figure out these jokers, hard to know what kind of mental operation, what seethings of emotion, what brand of ethics and what variety of belief and faith go to make them and their way of life.
It would have been so easy for Sipar to have missed the trail and swear it could not find it. Even from the start, it could have refused to go. Yet, fearing, it had gone. Reluctant, it had trailed. Without any need for faithfulness and loyalty, it had been loyal and faithful. But loyal to what, Duncan wondered, to him, the outlander and intruder? Loyal to itself? Or perhaps, although that seemed impossible, faithful to the Cytha?
What does Sipar think of me, he asked himself, and maybe more to the point, what do I think of Sipar? Is there a common meeting ground? Or are we, despite our humanoid forms, condemned forever to be alien and apart?
He held the rifle across his knees and stroked it, polishing it, petting it, making it even more closely a part of him, an instrument of his deadliness, an expression of his determination to track and kill the Cytha.
Just another chance, he begged. Just one second, or even less, to draw a steady bead. That is all I want, all I need, all I’ll ask.
Then he could go back across the days that he had left behind him, back to the farm and field, back into that misty other life from which he had been so mysteriously divorced, but which in time undoubtedly would become real and meaningful again.
Sipar came back. “I found the trail.”
Duncan heaved himself to his feet. “Good.”
They left the river and plunged into the forest and there the heat closed in more mercilessly than ever—humid, stifling heat that felt like a soggy blanket wrapped tightly round the body.
The trail lay plain and clear. The Cytha now, it seemed, was intent upon piling up a lead without recourse to evasive tactics. Perhaps it had reasoned that its pursuers would lose some time at the river and it may have been trying to stretch out that margin even further. Perhaps it needed that extra time, he speculated, to set up the necessary machinery for another dirty trick.
Sipar stopped and waited for Duncan to catch up. “Your knife, mister?”
Duncan hesitated. “What for?”
“I have a thorn in my foot,” the native said. “I have to get it out.”
Duncan pulled the knife from his belt and tossed it. Sipar caught it deftly.
Looking straight at Duncan, with the flicker of a smile upon its lips, the native cut its throat.
V
He should go back, he knew. Without the tracker, he didn’t have a chance. The odds were now with the Cytha—if, indeed, they had not been with it from the very start.
Unkillable? Unkillable because it grew in intelligence to meet emergencies? Unkillable because, pressed, it could fashion a bow and arrow, however crude? Unkillable because it had a sense of tactics, like rolling rocks at night upon its enemy? Unkillable because a native tracker would cheerfully kill itself to protect the Cytha?
A sort of crisis-beast, perhaps? One able to develop intelligence and abilities to meet each new situation and then lapsing back to the level of non-intelligent contentment? That, thought Duncan, would be a sensible way for anything to live. It would do away with the inconvenience and the irritability and the discontentment of intelligence when intelligence was unneeded. But the intelligence, and the abilities which went with it, would be there, safely tucked away where one could reach in and get them, like a necklace or a gun—something to be used or to be put away as the case might be.
Duncan hunched forward and with a stick of wood pushed the fire together. The flames blazed up anew and sent sparks flying up into the whispering darkness of the trees. The night had cooled off a little, but the humidity still hung on and a man felt uncomfortable—a little frightened, too.
Duncan lifted his head and stared up into the fire-flecked darkness. There were no stars because the heavy foliage shut them out. He missed the stars. He’d feel better if he could look up and see them.
When morning came, he should go back. He should quit this hunt which now had become impossible and even slightly foolish.
But he knew he wouldn’t. Somewhere along the three-day trail, he had become committed to a purpose and a challenge, and he knew that when morning came, he would go on again. It was not hatred that drove him, nor vengeance, nor even the trophy-urge—the hunter-lust that prodded men to kill something strange or harder to kill or bigger than any man had ever killed before. It was something more than that, some weird entangling of the Cytha’s meaning with his own.
He reached out and picked up the rifle and laid it in his lap. Its barrel gleamed dully in the flickering campfire light and he rubbed his hand along the stock as another man might stroke a woman’s throat.
“Mister,” said a voice.
It did not startle him, for the word was softly spoken and for a moment he had forgotten that Sipar was dead—dead with a half-smile fixed upon its face and with its throat laid wide open.
“Mister?”
Duncan stiffened.
Sipar was dead and there was no one else—and yet someone had spoken to him, and there could be only one thing in all this wilderness that might speak to him.
“Yes,” he said.
He did not move. He simply sat there, with the rifle in his lap.
“You know who I am?”
“I suppose you are the Cytha.”
“You have done well,” the Cytha said. “You’ve made a splendid hunt. There is no dishonor if you should decide to quit. Why don’t you go back? I promise you no harm.”
It was over there, somewhere in front of him, somewhere in the brush beyond the fire, almost straight across the fire from him, Duncan told himself. If he could keep it talking, perhaps even lure it out—
“Why should I?” he asked. “The hunt is never done until one gets the thing one is after.”
“I can kill you,” the Cytha told him. “But I do not want to kill. It hurts to kill.”
“That’s right,” said Duncan. “You are most perceptive.”
For he had it pegged now. He knew exactly where it was. He could afford a little mockery.
His thumb slid up the metal and nudged the fire control to automatic and he flexed his legs beneath him so that he could rise and fire in one single motion.
“Why did you hunt me?” the Cytha asked. “You are a stranger on my world and you had no right to hunt me. Not that I mind, of course. In fact, I found it stimulating. We must do it again. When I am ready to be hunted, I shall come and tell you and we can spend a day or two at it.”
“Sure we can,” said Duncan, rising. And as he rose into his crouch, he held the trigger down and the gun danced in insane fury, the muzzle flare a flicking tongue of hatred and the hail of death hissing spitefully in the underbrush.
“Anytime you want to,” yelled Duncan gleefully, “I’ll come and hunt you! You just say the word and I’ll be on your tail. I might even kill you. How do you like it, chump!”
And he held the trigger tight and kept his crouch so the slugs would not fly high, but would cut their swath just above the ground, and he moved the muzzle back and forth a lot so that he covered extra ground to compensate for any miscalculations he might have made.
The magazine ran out and the gun clicked empty and the vicious chatter stopped. Powder smoke drifted softly in the campfire light and the smell of it was perfume in the nostrils and in the underbrush many little feet were running, as if a thousand frightened mice were scurrying from catastrophe.
Duncan unhooked the extra magazine from where it hung upon his belt and replaced the empty one. Then he snatched a burning length of wood from the fire and waved it frantically until it burst into a blaze and became a torch. Rifle grasped in one hand and the torch in the other, he plunged into the underbrush. Little chittering things fled to escape him.
He did not find the Cytha. He found chewed-up bushes and soil churned by flying metal, and he found five lumps of flesh and fur, and these he brought back to the fire.
Now the fear that had been stalking him, keeping just beyond his reach, walked out from the shadows and hunkered by the campfire with him.
He placed the rifle within easy reach and arranged the five bloody chunks on the ground close to the fire and he tried with trembling fingers to restore them to the shape they’d been before the bullets struck them. And that was a good one, he thought with grim irony, because they had no shape. They had been part of the Cytha and you killed a Cytha inch by inch, not with a single shot. You knocked a pound of meat off it the first time, and the next time you shot off another pound or two, and if you got enough shots at it, you finally carved it down to size and maybe you could kill it then, although he wasn’t sure.
He was afraid. He admitted that he was and he squatted there and watched his fingers shake and he kept his jaws clamped tight to stop the chatter of his teeth.
The fear had been getting closer all the time; he knew it had moved in by a step or two when Sipar cut its throat, and why in the name of God had the damn fool done it? It made no sense at all. He had wondered about Sipar’s loyalties, and the very loyalties that he had dismissed as a sheer impossibility had been the answer, after all. In the end, for some obscure reason—obscure to humans, that is—Sipar’s loyalty had been to the Cytha.
But then what was the use of searching for any reason in it? Nothing that had happened made any sense. It made no sense that a beast one was pursuing should up and talk to one—although it did fit in with the theory of the crisis-beast he had fashioned in his mind.
Progressive adaptation, he told himself. Carry adaptation far enough and you’d reach communication. But might not the Cytha’s power of adaptation be running down? Had the Cytha gone about as far as it could force itself to go? Maybe so, he thought. It might be worth a gamble. Sipar’s suicide, for all its casualness, bore the overtones of last-notch desperation. And the Cytha’s speaking to Duncan, its attempt to parley with him, contained a note of weakness.
The arrow had failed and the rockslide had failed and so had Sipar’s death. What next would the Cytha try? Had it anything to try?
Tomorrow he’d find out. Tomorrow he’d go on. He couldn’t turn back now.
He was too deeply involved. He’d always wonder, if he turned back now, whether another hour or two might not have seen the end of it. There were too many questions, too much mystery—there was now far more at stake than ten rows of vua.
Another day might make some sense of it, might banish the dread walker that trod upon his heels, might bring some peace of mind.
As it stood right at the moment, none of it made sense.
But even as he thought it, suddenly one of the bits of bloody flesh and mangled fur made sense.
Beneath the punching and prodding of his fingers, it had assumed a shape.
Breathlessly, Duncan bent above it, not believing, not even wanting to believe, hoping frantically that it should prove completely wrong.
But there was nothing wrong with it. The shape was there and could not be denied. It had somehow fitted back into its natural shape and it was a baby screamer—well, maybe not a baby, but at least a tiny screamer.
Duncan sat back on his heels and sweated. He wiped his bloody hands upon the ground. He wondered what other shapes he’d find if he put back into proper place the other hunks of limpness that lay beside the fire.
He tried and failed. They were too smashed and torn.
He picked them up and tossed them in the fire. He took up his rifle and walked around the fire, sat down with his back against a tree, cradling the gun across his knees.
Those little scurrying feet, he wondered—like the scampering of a thousand busy mice. He had heard them twice, that first night in the thicket by the waterhole and again tonight.
And what could the Cytha be? Certainly not the simple, uncomplicated, marauding animal he had thought to start with.
A hive-beast? A host animal? A thing masquerading in many different forms?
Shotwell, trained in such deductions, might make a fairly accurate guess, but Shotwell was not here. He was at the farm, fretting, more than likely, over Duncan’s failure to return.
Finally the first light of morning began to filter through the forest and it was not the glaring, clean white light of the open plain and bush, but a softened, diluted, fuzzy green light to match the smothering vegetation.
The night noises died away and the noises of the day took up—the sawings of unseen insects, the screechings of hidden birds and something far away began to make a noise that sounded like an empty barrel falling slowly down a stairway.
What little coolness the night had brought dissipated swiftly and the heat clamped down, a breathless, relentless heat that quivered in the air.
Circling, Duncan picked up the Cytha trail not more than a hundred yards from camp.
The beast had been traveling fast. The pug marks were deeply sunk and widely spaced. Duncan followed as rapidly as he dared. It was a temptation to follow at a run, to match the Cytha’s speed, for the trail was plain and fresh and it fairly beckoned.
And that was wrong, Duncan told himself. It was too fresh, too plain—almost as if the animal had gone to endless trouble so that the human could not miss the trail.
He stopped his trailing and crouched beside a tree and studied the tracks ahead. His hands were too tense upon the gun, his body keyed too high and fine. He forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. He had to calm himself. He had to loosen up.
He studied the tracks ahead—four bunched pug marks, then a long leap interval, then four more bunched tracks, and between the sets of marks the forest floor was innocent and smooth.
Too smooth, perhaps. Especially the third one from him. Too smooth and somehow artificial, as if someone had patted it with gentle hands to make it unsuspicious.
Duncan sucked his breath in slowly.
Trap?
Or was his imagination playing tricks on him?
And if it were a trap, he would have fallen into it if he had kept on following as he had started out.
Now there was something else, a strange uneasiness, and he stirred uncomfortably, casting frantically for some clue to what it was.
He rose and stepped out from the tree, with the gun at ready. What a perfect place to set a trap, he thought. One would be looking at the pug marks, never at the space between them, for the space between would be neutral ground, safe to stride out upon.
Oh, clever Cytha, he said to himself. Oh, clever, clever Cytha!
And now he knew what the other trouble was—the great uneasiness. It was the sense of being watched.
Somewhere up ahead, the Cytha was crouched, watching and waiting—anxious or exultant, maybe even with laughter rumbling in its throat.
He walked slowly forward until he reached the third set of tracks and he saw that he had been right. The little area ahead was smoother than it should be.
“Cytha!” he called.
His voice was far louder than he had meant it to be and he stood astonished and a bit abashed.
Then he realized why it was so loud.
It was the only sound there was!
The forest suddenly had fallen silent. The insects and birds were quiet and the thing in the distance had quit falling down the stairs. Even the leaves were silent. There was no rustle in them and they hung limp upon their stems.
There was a feeling of doom and the green light had changed to a copper light and everything was still.
And the light was copper!
Duncan spun around in panic. There was no place for him to hide.
Before he could take another step, the skun came and the winds rushed out of nowhere. The air was clogged with flying leaves and debris. Trees snapped and popped and tumbled in the air.
The wind hurled Duncan to his knees, and as he fought to regain his feet, he remembered, in a blinding flash of total recall, how it had looked from atop the escarpment—the boiling fury of the winds and the mad swirling of the coppery mist and how the trees had whipped in whirlpool fashion.
He came half erect and stumbled, clawing at the ground in an attempt to get up again, while inside his brain an insistent, clicking voice cried out for him to run, and somewhere another voice said to lie flat upon the ground, to dig in as best he could.
Something struck him from behind and he went down, pinned flat, with his rifle wedged beneath him. He cracked his head upon the ground and the world whirled sickeningly and plastered his face with a handful of mud and tattered leaves.
He tried to crawl and couldn’t, for something had grabbed him by the ankle and was hanging on.
With a frantic hand, he clawed the mess out of his eyes, spat it from his mouth.
Across the spinning ground, something black and angular tumbled rapidly. It was coming straight toward him and he saw it was the Cytha and that in another second it would be on top of him.
He threw up an arm across his face, with the elbow crooked, to take the impact of the windblown Cytha and to ward it off.
But it never reached him. Less than a yard away, the ground opened up to take the Cytha and it was no longer there.
Suddenly the wind cut off and the leaves once more hung motionless and the heat clamped down again and that was the end of it. The skun had come and struck and gone.
Minutes, Duncan wondered, or perhaps no more than seconds. But in those seconds, the forest had been flattened and the trees lay in shattered heaps.
He raised himself on an elbow and looked to see what was the matter with his foot and he saw that a fallen tree had trapped his foot beneath it.
He tugged a few times experimentally. It was no use. Two close-set limbs, branching almost at right angles from the hole, had been driven deep into the ground and his foot, he saw, had been caught at the ankle in the fork of the buried branches.
The foot didn’t hurt—not yet. It didn’t seem to be there at all. He tried wiggling his toes and felt none.
He wiped the sweat off his face with a shirt sleeve and fought to force down the panic that was rising in him. Getting panicky was the worst thing a man could do in a spot like this. The thing to do was to take stock of the situation, figure out the best approach, then go ahead and try it.
The tree looked heavy, but perhaps he could handle it if he had to, although there was the danger that if he shifted it, the bole might settle more solidly and crush his foot beneath it. At the moment, the two heavy branches, thrust into the ground on either side of his ankle, were holding most of the tree’s weight off his foot.
The best thing to do, he decided, was to dig the ground away beneath his foot until he could pull it out.
He twisted around and started digging with the fingers of one hand. Beneath the thin covering of humus, he struck a solid surface and his fingers slid along it.
With mounting alarm, he explored the ground, scratching at the humus. There was nothing but rock—some long-buried boulder, the top of which lay just beneath the ground.
His foot was trapped beneath a heavy tree and a massive boulder, held securely in place by forked branches that had forced their splintering way down along the boulder’s sides.
He lay back, propped on an elbow. It was evident that he could do nothing about the buried boulder. If he was going to do anything, his problem was the tree.
To move the tree, he would need a lever and he had a good, stout lever in his rifle. It would be a shame, he thought a little wryly, to use a gun for such a purpose, but he had no choice.
He worked for an hour and it was no good. Even with the rifle as a pry, he could not budge the tree.
He lay back, defeated, breathing hard, wringing wet with perspiration.
He grimaced at the sky.
All right, Cytha, he thought, you won out in the end. But it took a skun to do it. With all your tricks, you couldn’t do the job until. …
Then he remembered.
He sat up hurriedly.
“Cytha!” he called.
The Cytha had fallen into a hole that had opened in the ground. The hole was less than an arm’s length away from him, with a little debris around its edges still trickling into it.
Duncan stretched out his body, lying flat upon the ground, and looked into the hole. There, at the bottom of it, was the Cytha.
It was the first time he’d gotten a good look at the Cytha and it was a crazily put-together thing. It seemed to have nothing functional about it and it looked more like a heap of something, just thrown on the ground, than it did an animal.
The hole, he saw, was more than an ordinary hole. It was a pit and very cleverly constructed. The mouth was about four feet in diameter and it widened to roughly twice that at the bottom. It was, in general, bottle-shaped, with an incurving shoulder at the top so that anything that fell in could not climb out. Anything falling into that pit was in to stay.
This, Duncan knew, was what had lain beneath that too-smooth interval between the two sets of Cytha tracks. The Cytha had worked all night to dig it, then had carried away the dirt dug out of the pit and had built a flimsy camouflage cover over it. Then it had gone back and made the trail that was so loud and clear, so easy to make out and follow. And having done all that, having labored hard and stealthily, the Cytha had settled down to watch, to make sure the following human had fallen in the pit.
“Hi, pal,” said Duncan. “How are you making out?”
The Cytha did not answer.
“Classy pit,” said Duncan. “Do you always den up in luxury like this?”
But the Cytha didn’t answer.
Something queer was happening to the Cytha. It was coming all apart.
Duncan watched with fascinated horror as the Cytha broke down into a thousand lumps of motion that scurried in the pit and tried to scramble up its sides, only to fall back in tiny showers of sand.
Amid the scurrying lumps, one thing remained intact, a fragile object that resembled nothing quite so much as the stripped skeleton of a Thanksgiving turkey. But it was a most extraordinary Thanksgiving skeleton, for it throbbed with pulsing life and glowed with a steady violet light.
Chitterings and squeakings came out of the pit and the soft patter of tiny running feet, and as Duncan’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the pit, he began to make out the forms of some of the scurrying shapes. There were tiny screamers and some donovans and sawmill birds and a bevy of kill-devils and something else as well.
Duncan raised a hand and pressed it against his eyes, then took it quickly away. The little faces still were there, looking up as if beseeching him, with the white shine of their teeth and the white rolling of their eyes.
He felt horror wrenching at his stomach and the sour, bitter taste of revulsion welled into his throat, but he fought it down, harking back to that day at the farm before they had started on the hunt.
“I can track down anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans,” Sipar had told him solemnly. “These are my taboos.”
And Sipar was also their taboo, for he had not feared the donovan. Sipar had been, however, somewhat fearful of the screamers in the dead of night because, the native had told him reasonably, screamers were forgetful.
Forgetful of what!
Forgetful of the Cytha-mother? Forgetful of the motley brood in which they had spent their childhood?
For that was the only answer to what was running in the pit and the whole, unsuspected answer to the enigma against which men like Shotwell had frustratedly banged their heads for years.
Strange, he told himself. All right, it might be strange, but if it worked, what difference did it make? So the planet’s denizens were sexless because there was no need of sex—what was wrong with that? It might, in fact, Duncan admitted to himself, head off a lot of trouble. No family spats, no triangle trouble, no fighting over mates. While it might be unexciting, it did seem downright peaceful.
And since there was no sex, the Cytha species was the planetary mother—but more than just a mother. The Cytha, more than likely, was mother-father, incubator, nursery, teacher and perhaps many other things besides, all rolled into one.
In many ways, he thought, it might make a lot of sense. Here natural selection would be ruled out and ecology could be controlled in considerable degree and mutation might even be a matter of deliberate choice rather than random happenstance.
And it would make for a potential planetary unity such as no other world had ever known. Everything here was kin to everything else. Here was a planet where Man, or any other alien, must learn to tread most softly. For it was not inconceivable that, in a crisis or a clash of interests, one might find himself faced suddenly with a unified and cooperating planet, with every form of life making common cause against the interloper.
The little scurrying things had given up; they’d gone back to their places, clustered around the pulsing violet of the Thanksgiving skeleton, each one fitting into place until the Cytha had taken shape again. As if, Duncan told himself, blood and nerve and muscle had come back from a brief vacation to form the beast anew.
“Mister,” asked the Cytha, “what do we do now?”
“You should know,” Duncan told it. “You were the one who dug the pit.”
“I split myself,” the Cytha said. “A part of me dug the pit and the other part that stayed on the surface got me out when the job was done.”
“Convenient,” grunted Duncan.
And it was convenient. That was what had happened to the Cytha when he had shot at it—it had split into all its component parts and had got away. And that night beside the waterhole, it had spied on him, again in the form of all its separate parts, from the safety of the thicket.
“You are caught and so am I,” the Cytha said. “Both of us will die here. It seems a fitting end to our association. Do you not agree with me?”
“I’ll get you out,” said Duncan wearily. “I have no quarrel with children.”
He dragged the rifle toward him and unhooked the sling from the stock. Carefully he lowered the gun by the sling, still attached to the barrel, down into the pit.
The Cytha reared up and grasped it with its forepaws.
“Easy now,” Duncan cautioned. “You’re heavy. I don’t know if I can hold you.”
But he needn’t have worried. The little ones were detaching themselves and scrambling up the rifle and the sling. They reached his extended arms and ran up them with scrabbling claws. Little sneering screamers and the comic stilt-birds and the mouse-size kill-devils that snarled at him as they climbed. And the little grinning natives—not babies, scarcely children, but small editions of full-grown humanoids. And the weird donovans scampering happily.
They came climbing up his arms and across his shoulders and milled about on the ground beside him, waiting for the others.
And finally the Cytha, not skinned down to the bare bones of its Thanksgiving-turkey-size, but far smaller than it had been, climbed awkwardly up the rifle and the sling to safety.
Duncan hauled the rifle up and twisted himself into a sitting position.
The Cytha, he saw, was reassembling.
He watched in fascination as the restless miniatures of the planet’s life swarmed and seethed like a hive of bees, each one clicking into place to form the entire beast.
And now the Cytha was complete. Yet small—still small—no more than lion-size.
“But it is such a little one,” Zikkara had argued with him that morning at the farm. “It is such a young one.”
Just a young brood, no more than suckling infants—if suckling was the word, or even some kind of wild approximation. And through the months and years, the Cytha would grow, with the growing of its diverse children, until it became a monstrous thing.
It stood there looking at Duncan and the tree.
“Now,” said Duncan, “if you’ll push on the tree, I think that between the two of us—”
“It is too bad,” the Cytha said, and wheeled itself about.
He watched it go loping off.
“Hey!” he yelled.
But it didn’t stop.
He grabbed up the rifle and had it halfway to his shoulder before he remembered how absolutely futile it was to shoot at the Cytha.
He let the rifle down.
“The dirty, ungrateful, double-crossing—”
He stopped himself. There was no profit in rage. When you were in a jam, you did the best you could. You figured out the problem and you picked the course that seemed best and you didn’t panic at the odds.
He laid the rifle in his lap and started to hook up the sling and it was not till then that he saw the barrel was packed with sand and dirt.
He sat numbly for a moment, thinking back to how close he had been to firing at the Cytha, and if that barrel was packed hard enough or deep enough, he might have had an exploding weapon in his hands.
He had used the rifle as a crowbar, which was no way to use a gun. That was one way, he told himself, that was guaranteed to ruin it.
Duncan hunted around and found a twig and dug at the clogged muzzle, but the dirt was jammed too firmly in it and he made little progress.
He dropped the twig and was hunting for another stronger one when he caught the motion in a nearby clump of brush.
He watched closely for a moment and there was nothing, so he resumed the hunt for a stronger twig. He found one and started poking at the muzzle and there was another flash of motion.
He twisted around. Not more than twenty feet away, a screamer sat easily on its haunches. Its tongue was lolling out and it had what looked like a grin upon its face.
And there was another, just at the edge of the clump of brush where he had caught the motion first.
There were others as well, he knew. He could hear them sliding through the tangle of fallen trees, could sense the soft padding of their feet.
The executioners, he thought.
The Cytha certainly had not wasted any time.
He raised the rifle and rapped the barrel smartly on the fallen tree, trying to dislodge the obstruction in the bore. But it didn’t budge; the barrel still was packed with sand.
But no matter—he’d have to fire anyhow and take whatever chance there was.
He shoved the control to automatic, and tilted up the muzzle.
There were six of them now, sitting in a ragged row, grinning at him, not in any hurry. They were sure of him and there was no hurry. He’d still be there when they decided to move in.
And there were others—on all sides of him.
Once it started, he wouldn’t have a chance.
“It’ll be expensive, gents,” he told them.
And he was astonished at how calm, how coldly objective he could be, now that the chips were down. But that was the way it was, he realized.
He’d thought, a while ago, how a man might suddenly find himself face to face with an aroused and cooperating planet. Maybe this was it in miniature.
The Cytha had obviously passed the word along: Man back there needs killing. Go and get him.
Just like that, for a Cytha would be the power here. A life force, the giver of life, the decider of life, the repository of all animal life on the entire planet.
There was more than one of them, of course. Probably they had home districts, spheres of influence and responsibility mapped out. And each one would be a power supreme in its own district.
Momism, he thought with a sour grin. Momism at its absolute peak.
Nevertheless, he told himself, it wasn’t too bad a system if you wanted to consider it objectively.
But he was in a poor position to be objective about that or anything else.
The screamers were inching closer, hitching themselves forward slowly on their bottoms.
“I’m going to set up a deadline for you critters,” Duncan called out. “Just two feet farther, up to that rock, and I let you have it.”
He’d get all six of them, of course, but the shots would be the signal for the general rush by all those other animals slinking in the brush.
If he were free, if he were on his feet, possibly he could beat them off. But pinned as he was, he didn’t have a chance. It would be all over less than a minute after he opened fire. He might, he figured, last as long as that.
The six inched closer and he raised the rifle.
But they stopped and moved no farther. Their ears lifted just a little, as if they might be listening, and the grins dropped from their faces. They squirmed uneasily and assumed a look of guilt and, like shadows, they were gone, melting away so swiftly that he scarcely saw them go.
Duncan sat quietly, listening, but he could hear no sound.
Reprieve, he thought. But for how long? Something had scared them off, but in a while they might be back. He had to get out of here and he had to make it fast.
If he could find a longer lever, he could move the tree. There was a branch slanting up from the topside of the fallen tree. It was almost four inches at the butt and it carried its diameter well.
He slid the knife from his belt and looked at it. Too small, too thin, he thought, to chisel through a four-inch branch, but it was all he had. When a man was desperate enough, though, when his very life depended on it, he would do anything.
He hitched himself along, sliding toward the point where the branch protruded from the tree. His pinned leg protested with stabs of pain as his body wrenched it around. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself closer. Pain slashed through his leg again and he was still long inches from the branch.
He tried once more, then gave up. He lay panting on the ground.
There was just one thing left.
He’d have to try to hack out a notch in the trunk just above his leg. No, that would be next to impossible, for he’d be cutting into the whorled and twisted grain at the base of the supporting fork.
Either that or cut off his foot, and that was even more impossible. A man would faint before he got the job done.
It was useless, he knew. He could do neither one. There was nothing he could do.
For the first time, he admitted to himself: He would stay here and die. Shotwell, back at the farm, in a day or two might set out hunting for him. But Shotwell would never find him. And anyhow, by nightfall, if not sooner, the screamers would be back.
He laughed gruffly in his throat—laughing at himself.
The Cytha had won the hunt hands down. It had used a human weakness to win and then had used that same human weakness to achieve a viciously poetic vengeance.
After all, what could one expect? One could not equate human ethics with the ethics of the Cytha. Might not human ethics, in certain cases, seem as weird and illogical, as infamous and ungrateful, to an alien?
He hunted for a twig and began working again to clean the rifle bore.
A crashing behind him twisted him around and he saw the Cytha. Behind the Cytha stalked a donovan.
He tossed away the twig and raised the gun.
“No,” said the Cytha sharply.
The donovan tramped purposefully forward and Duncan felt the prickling of the skin along his back. It was a frightful thing. Nothing could stand before a donovan. The screamers had turned tail and run when they had heard it a couple of miles or more away.
The donovan was named for the first known human to be killed by one. That first was only one of many. The roll of donovan-victims ran long, and no wonder, Duncan thought. It was the closest he had ever been to one of the beasts and he felt a coldness creeping over him. It was like an elephant and a tiger and a grizzly bear wrapped in the selfsame hide. It was the most vicious fighting machine that ever had been spawned.
He lowered the rifle. There would be no point in shooting. In two quick strides, the beast could be upon him.
The donovan almost stepped on him and he flinched away. Then the great head lowered and gave the fallen tree a butt and the tree bounced for a yard or two. The donovan kept on walking. Its powerfully muscled stern moved into the brush and out of sight.
“Now we are even,” said the Cytha. “I had to get some help.”
Duncan grunted. He flexed the leg that had been trapped and he could not feel the foot. Using his rifle as a cane, he pulled himself erect. He tried putting weight on the injured foot and it screamed with pain.
He braced himself with the rifle and rotated so that he faced the Cytha.
“Thanks, pal,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d do it.”
“You will not hunt me now?”
Duncan shook his head. “I’m in no shape for hunting. I am heading home.”
“It was the vua, wasn’t it? That was why you hunted me?”
“The vua is my livelihood,” said Duncan. “I cannot let you eat it.”
The Cytha stood silently and Duncan watched it for a moment. Then he wheeled. Using the rifle for a crutch, he started hobbling away.
The Cytha hurried to catch up with him.
“Let us make a bargain, mister. I will not eat the vua and you will not hunt me. Is that fair enough?”
“That is fine with me,” said Duncan. “Let us shake on it.”
He put down a hand and the Cytha lifted up a paw. They shook, somewhat awkwardly, but very solemnly.
“Now,” the Cytha said, “I will see you home. The screamers would have you before you got out of the woods.”
VI
They halted on a knoll. Below them lay the farm, with the vua rows straight and green in the red soil of the fields.
“You can make it from here,” the Cytha said. “I am wearing thin. It is an awful effort to keep on being smart. I want to go back to ignorance and comfort.”
“It was nice knowing you,” Duncan told it politely. “And thanks for sticking with me.”
He started down the hill, leaning heavily on the rifle-crutch. Then he frowned troubledly and turned back.
“Look,” he said, “you’ll go back to animal again. Then you will forget. One of these days, you’ll see all that nice, tender vua and—”
“Very simple,” said the Cytha. “If you find me in the vua, just begin hunting me. With you after me, I will quickly get smart and remember once again and it will be all right.”
“Sure,” agreed Duncan. “I guess that will work.”
The Cytha watched him go stumping down the hill.
Admirable, it thought. Next time I have a brood, I think I’ll raise a dozen like him.
It turned around and headed for the deeper brush.
It felt intelligence slipping from it, felt the old, uncaring comfort coming back again. But it glowed with anticipation, seethed with happiness at the big surprise it had in store for its newfound friend.
Won’t he be happy and surprised when I drop them at his door, it thought.
Will he be ever pleased!
The Shipshape Miracle
If Cheviot Sherwood ever had believed in miracles, he believed in them no longer. He had no illusions now. He knew exactly what he faced.
His life would come to an end on this uninhabited backwoods planet and there’d be none to mourn him, none to know. Not, he thought, that there would be any mourners, under any circumstance. Although there were those who would be glad to see him, who would come running if they knew where he might be found.
These were people, very definitely, that Sherwood had no desire to see.
His great, one might say his overwhelming, desire not to see them could account in part for his present situation, since he had taken off from the last planet of record without filing flight plans and lacking clearance.
Since no one knew where he might have headed and since his radio was junk, there was no likelihood at all that anyone would find him—even if they looked, which would be a matter of some doubt. Probably the most that anyone would do would be to send out messages to other planets to place authorities on the alert for him.
And since his spaceship, for the lack of a certain valve for which he had no replacement, was not going anywhere, he was stuck here on this planet.
If that had been all there had been to it, it might not have been so bad. But there was a final irony that under other circumstances (if it had been happening to someone else, let’s say), would have kept Sherwood in stitches of forthright merriment for hours on end at the very thought of it. But since he was the one involved, there was no merriment.
For now, when he could gain no benefit, he was potentially rich beyond even his own most greedy and most lurid dreams.
On the ridge above the camp he’d get up beside his crippled spaceship lay a strip of clay-cemented conglomerate that fairly reeked with diamonds. They lay scattered on the hillside, washed out by the weather; they were mixed liberally in the gravel of the tiny stream that wended through the valley. They could be picked up by the basket. They were of high quality; there were several, the size of human skulls, that probably were priceless.
Sherwood was of a hardy, rough and tumble breed. Once he became convinced of his situation he made the best of it. He made his camp into a home and laid in supplies—digging roots, gathering nuts, drying fish and making pemmican. If he was to be cast in the role of a Robinson Crusoe, he proposed to be at least comfortably well fed.
In his spare time he gathered diamonds, dumping them in a pile outside his shack. And in the idle afternoons or the long evenings, he sat beside his campfire and sorted them out—washing them free of clinging dirt and grading them according to their size and brilliance. The very best of them he put into a sack, designed for easy grabbing if the time should ever come when he might depart the planet.
Not that he had any hope this would come about.
Even so, he was a man who planned against contingencies. He always tried to have some sort of loophole. Had this not been the case, his career would have ended long before, at any one of a dozen times or places. That it apparently had come to an end now could be attributed to a certain lack of foresight in not carrying a full complement of spare parts. Although perhaps this was understandable, since never before in the history of space flight had that particular valve which now spelled out Sherwood’s doom ever misbehaved.
Perhaps it was well for him that he was not an introspective man. If he had been given to much searching thought, he might have found himself living with his past, and there were places in his past that were far from pretty.
He was lucky in many other ways, of course. The planet was not a bad one, a sort of New England planet with a rocky, tumbled terrain, forested by scrubby trees and distinctly terrestrial. He might just as easily have been marooned upon a jungle planet or one of the icy planets or any of another dozen different kinds that were not tolerant of life.
So he settled in and made the best of it and didn’t even bother to count off the days. For he knew what he was in for.
He counted on no miracle.
The miracle he had not counted on came late one afternoon as he sat, cross-legged, sorting out his latest haul of priceless diamonds.
The great black ship came in from the east across the rolling hills. It whistled down across the ridges and settled to the ground a short distance from Sherwood’s crippled ship and his patched-together shack.
It was no patrol vessel, although in his position, Sherwood would have welcomed even one of these. It was a kind of ship he’d never seen before. It was globular and black and it had no identifying marks on it.
He leaped to his feet and ran toward the ship. He waved his arms in welcome and whooped with his delight. He stopped a hundred feet away when he felt the first whiff of the heat that had been picked up by the vessel’s hull in its plunge through atmosphere.
“Hey, in there!” he yelled.
And the Ship spoke to him. “You need not yell,” it told him. “I can hear you very well.”
“Who are you?” asked Sherwood.
“I am the Ship,” the voice told him.
“Quit fooling around,” yelled Sherwood, “and tell me who you are.”
For the sort of answer it had given was foolishness. Of course it was the ship. It was someone in the ship, talking to him through a speaker in the hull.
“I have told you,” said the Ship. “I am the Ship.”
“But there is someone speaking to me.”
“The ship is speaking to you.”
“All right, then,” said Sherwood. “If you want it that way, it’s okay with me. Can you take me out of here? My radio is broken and my ship disabled.”
“Perhaps I can,” said the Ship. “Tell me who you are.”
Sherwood hesitated for a moment, and then he told who he was, quite truthfully. For it suddenly had occurred to him that this ship was as much an outlaw as he was himself. It had no markings and all ships must have markings.
“You say you left your last port without proper clearance?”
“Yes,” said Sherwood. “There were certain circumstances.”
“And no one knows where you are? No one’s looking for you?”
“How could they?” Sherwood asked.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Just anywhere,” said Sherwood. “I have no preference.”
For even if they should land him somewhere where he had no wish to be, he still would have a running chance. On this planet he had no chance at all.
“All right,” said the ship. “You can come aboard.”
A hatch came open in the hull and a ladder began running out.
“Just a second,” Sherwood shouted. “I’ll be right there.”
He sprinted to the shack and grabbed his sack of the finest diamonds, then legged it for the ship. He got there almost as soon as the ladder touched the ground.
The hull still was crackling with warmth, but Sherwood swarmed up the ladder, paying no attention.
He was set for life, he thought. Unless—
And then the thought struck him that they might take the diamonds from him. They could pretend it was payment for his passage. Or they could simply take them without an excuse of any sort at all.
But it was too late now. He was almost in the hatch. To drop the sack of diamonds now would do no more than arouse suspicion and would gain him nothing.
It came of greediness, he thought. He did not need this many diamonds. Just a half dozen of the finest dropped into his pockets would have been enough. Enough to buy him another ship so he could return and get a load of them.
But he was committed now. There was nothing he could do except to see it through.
He reached the hatch and tumbled through it. There was no one waiting. The inner lock stood open and there was no one there.
He stopped to stare at the emptiness and behind him the retracting ladder rumbled softly and the hatch hissed to a close.
“Hey,” he shouted, “where is everyone?”
“There is no one here,” the voice said, “but me.”
“All right,” said Sherwood. “Where do I go to find you?”
“You have found me,” said the Ship. “You are standing in me.”
“You mean. …”
“I told you,” said the Ship. “I said I was the Ship. That is what I am.”
“But no one. …”
“You do not understand,” said the Ship. “There is no need of anyone. I am myself. I am intelligent. I am part machine, part human. Rather, perhaps, at one time I was. I have thought, in recent years, the two of us have merged so we’re neither human nor machine, but something new entirely.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Sherwood, beginning to get frightened. “There can’t be such a thing.”
“Consider,” said the Ship, “a certain human who had worked for years to build me and who, as he finished me, found death was closing in. …”
“Let me out!” yelled Sherwood. “Let me out of here! I don’t want to be rescued. I don’t want. …”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Sherwood, it is rather late for that. We’re already out in space.”
“Out in space! We can’t be! It isn’t possible!”
“Of course it is,” the Ship told him. “You expected thrust. There was no thrust. We simply lifted.”
“No ship,” insisted Sherwood, “can get off a planet. …”
“You’re thinking, Mr. Sherwood, of the ships built by human hands. Not of a living ship. Not of an intelligent machine. Not of what becomes possible with the merging of a man and a machine.”
“You mean you built yourself?”
“Of course not. Not to start with. I was built by human hands to start with. But I’ve redesigned myself and rebuilt myself, not once, but many times. I knew my capabilities. I knew my dreams and wishes. I made myself the kind of thing I was capable of being—not the halfway, makeshift thing that was the best the human race could do.”
“The man you spoke of,” Sherwood said. “The one who was about to die. …”
“He is part of me,” said the Ship. “If you must think of him as a separate entity, he, then, is talking to you. For when I say ‘I,’ I mean both of us, for we’ve become as one.”
“I don’t get it,” Sherwood told the Ship, feeling the panic coming back again.
“He built me, long ago, as a ship which would respond, not to the pushing of a lever or the pressing of a button, but to the mental commands of the man who drove me. I was to become, in effect, an extension of that man. There was a helmet that the man would wear and he’d think into the helmet.”
“I understand,” said Sherwood.
“He’d think into the helmet and I was so programmed that I’d obey his thoughts. I became, in effect, a man, and the man became in effect the ship he operated.”
“Nice deal,” Sherwood said enthusiastically, never being one upon whom the niceties of certain advantages were ever lost.
“He finished me and he was about to die and it was a pity that such a one should die—one who had worked so hard to do what he had done. Who’d given up so much. Who never had seen space. Who had gone nowhere.”
“No,” said Sherwood, in revulsion, knowing what was coming. “No, he’d not done that.”
“It was a kindness,” said the ship. “It was what he wanted. He managed it himself. He simply gave up his body. His body was a worthless hulk that was about to die. The modifications to accommodate a human brain rather than a human skull were quite elementary. And he has been happy. We have both of us been happy.”
Sherwood stood without saying anything. In the silence he was listening for some sound, for any kind of tiny rattle or hum, for anything at all to tell him the ship was operating. But there was no sound and no sense of motion of any sort.
“Happy,” he said. “Where would you have found happiness? What’s the point of all this?”
“That,” the Ship said solemnly, “is a bit hard to explain.”
Sherwood stood and thought about it—the endless voyaging through space without a body—with all the desires, all the advantages, all the capabilities of a body gone forever.
“There is nothing for you to fear,” said the Ship. “You need not concern yourself. We have a cabin for you. Just down the corridor, the first door to your left.”
“I thank you,” Sherwood said, although he was nervous still.
If he had had a choice, he told himself, he’d stayed back on the planet. But since he was here, he’d have to make the best of it. And there were, he admitted to himself, certain advantages and certain possibilities that needed further thought.
He went down the corridor and pushed on the door. It opened on the cabin. For a spaceship it looked comfortable enough. A little cramped, of course, but then all cabins were. Space is at a premium on any sort of ship.
He went in and placed his sack of diamonds on the bunk that hinged out from the wall. He sat down in the single metal chair that stood beside the bunk.
“Are you comfortable, Mr. Sherwood?”
“Very comfortable,” he said.
It was going to be all right, he told himself. A very crazy setup, but it would be all right. Perhaps a little spooky and a bit hard to believe, but probably better, after all, than staying marooned, back there on the planet. For this would not last forever. And the planet could have been, most probably would have been, forever.
It would take a while to reach another planet, for space was rather sparsely populated in this area. There would be time to think and plan. He might be able to work out something that would be to his great advantage.
He leaned back in the chair and stretched out his legs. His brain began to click in a ceaseless scurrying back and forth, nosing from every angle all the possibilities that existed in this setup.
It was nice, he thought—this entire operation. The Ship undoubtedly had figured out some angles for itself which no human yet had thought of.
There were a lot of things to do. He’d have to learn the capabilities of the Ship and give close study to its personality, seeking out its weak points and its strength. Then he’d have to plan his strategy and be careful not to give away his thinking. He must not move until he was entirely ready.
There might be many ways to do it. There might be flattery or there might be a business proposition or there might be blackmail. He’d have to think on it and study and follow out the line of action that seemed to be the best.
He wondered at the Ship’s means of operation. Anti-gravity, perhaps, so far considered as a source of power.
He got up from the chair and paced, three paces across the room. Or a fusion chamber. Or perhaps some method which had not been and back, restlessly pondering odds.
Yes, he thought, it would be a nice kind of ship to have. More than likely there was nothing in all of space that could touch it in speed and maneuverability. Nothing that could overhaul it should he ever have to run. It could apparently set down anywhere. It was probably self-repairing, for the Ship had spoken of redesigning and of rebuilding itself. With the memory of his recent situation still fresh inside his mind, this was comforting.
There must be a way to get the Ship, he told himself. There had to be a way to get it. It was something that he needed.
He could buy another ship, of course; with the diamonds in the sacking he could buy a fleet of ships. But this was the one he wanted.
Maybe it had been pure luck this Ship had picked him up. For any other legal ship would probably turn him over to the authorities at its next port of call, but this Ship didn’t seem to mind who he was or what his record might be. Any other ship that was not entirely legal would have grabbed off, not only the diamonds that he had but his discovery of the diamond field. But this particular Ship had no concern with diamonds.
What a setup, he thought. A human brain and a spaceship tied together, so closely tied together that their identities had merged. He shivered at the thought of it, for it was a gruesome thing.
Although perhaps it had not meant too much to that old man who was about to die. He had traded an aged and death-marked body for many years of life. Perhaps life as a part of a space-traveling machine was better than no life at all.
How many years, he wondered, had it been since that old man had translated himself into something else than human? A hundred? Five hundred? Perhaps even more than that.
In those years where had he been and what might he have seen? And, most pertinent of all, what thoughts had run through and congealed and formed within his mind? What was life like for him? Not a human sort of life, of course, not a human viewpoint, but something else entirely.
Sherwood tried to imagine what it might be like, but gave up in dismay. It would necessarily be a negation of everything he lived for—all the sensual pleasure, all the dreams of gain and glory, all the neat behavior patterns he had set up for himself, all his self-made rules of conduct and of conscience.
A miracle, he thought. As a matter of fact, there’d been two miracles. The first had been when he had been able to set his ship down without a crackup when the valve had failed. He had come in close above the planet’s surface to find a place to land—and suddenly the valve went out and the engine failed and there he’d been, plunging down above the rough terrain. Then suddenly he had glimpsed a place where a landing might be just barely possible and had fought the controls madly to hit that certain spot and finally had hit it—alive.
It had been a miracle that he had made the landing; and the coming of the Ship to rescue him had been the second miracle.
The bunk dropped down flat against the wall and his sack of diamonds was dumped onto the floor.
“Hey, what goes on?” yelled Sherwood. Then he wished he had not yelled, for it was quite clear exactly what had happened. The support that held the bunk had not been snapped properly into place and had given way, letting down the bunk.
“Something wrong, Mr. Sherwood?” asked the Ship.
“No, not a thing,” said Sherwood. “My bunk fell down. I guess it startled me.”
He bent down to pick up the diamonds. As he did, the chair quietly and efficiently slid back against the wall, folded itself up and slid into a slight depression that exactly fitted it.
Squatted to pick up the diamonds, Sherwood watched the chair in horrified fascination, then swiftly spun around. The bunk no longer hung against the wall, also had fitted itself into another niche.
Cold fear speared into Sherwood. He rose swiftly to his feet, turning like a man at bay. He stood in a bare cubicle. With both the bunk and chair retracted, he stood within four bare walls.
He sprang toward the door and there wasn’t any door. There was only wall.
He staggered back into the center of the cubicle and spun around to view each wall in turn. There was no door in any of the walls. The metal went up from floor to ceiling without a single break.
The walls began to move, closing in on him, sliding in, retracting.
He watched, incredulous, frozen, thinking that perhaps he’d imagined the moving of the walls.
But it was not imagination. Slowly, inexorably, the walls were closing in. Had he put out his arms, he could have touched them on either side of him.
“Ship!” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm.
“Yes, Mr. Sherwood.”
“You are malfunctioning. The walls are closing in.”
“No,” said the Ship. “No malfunction, I assure you. A very proper function. My brain grows tired and feeble. It is not the body only—the brain also has its limits. I suspected that it might, but I could not know. There was a chance, of course, that separated from the poison of a body, it might live in its bath of nutrients forever.”
“No!” rasped Sherwood, his breath strangling in his throat. “No, not me!”
“Who else?” asked the Ship. “I have searched for years and you are the first who fitted.”
“Fitted!” Sherwood screamed.
“Why, of course,” the Ship said calmly, happily. “A man who would not be missed. No one knowing where you were. No one hunting for you. No one who will miss you. I had hunted for someone like you and had despaired of finding one. For I am humane. I would cause no one grief or sadness.”
The walls kept closing in.
The Ship seemed to sigh in metallic contentment.
“Believe me, Mr. Sherwood,” it said, “finding you was a very miracle.”
Colophon
Short Fiction
was published between and by Clifford D. Simak.
The cover page is adapted from Lake George Reflection,
a painting completed around by Georgia O’Keeffe.
The cover and title pages feature the League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in and by The League of Moveable Type.
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