DEAD MAN'S PLANET
By Joseph Samachson
When a driven man arrives at a cemetery world, what else can it be but journey's end--and the start of a new one?
Outside the ship, it was the sun that blazed angrily. Inside, it was Sam Wilson's temper. "Study your lessons," he snarled, with a savageness that surprised himself, "or I'll never let you set foot on this planet at all."
"Okay, Pop," said Mark, a little white around the nostrils. He looked old for so young a kid. "I didn't mean anything wrong."
"I don't care what you meant. You do as you're told."
In the quiet that followed, broken only by the hum of the arithmetic-tape, Sam wondered at himself. As kids went, Mark had never been a nuisance. Certainly Rhoda had never had any trouble with him. But Rhoda had been altogether different. Sam was tough and he had always got a sense of satisfaction out of knowing that he was hard-boiled. Or at least that was once true. Rhoda had been sweet, gentle....
He aroused himself from thoughts of her by calling, "Mark!"
"Yes, Pop?"
His voice had been harsher than he had intended. Over the past few weeks he seemed gradually to have been losing control of it. Now, although he was going to do his son a favor, he sounded like a slavemaster threatening a beating. "You can shut off your arithmetic lesson. We're going out."
"But didn't you want me--"
"I changed my mind."
Mark seemed more troubled than pleased, as if a father who changed his mind so readily was a man to be wary of.
I'm on edge all the time, thought Sam, and I'm getting him that way, too. I'll have to regain control of myself.
* * * * *
He had long ago made all the necessary tests for such possible dangers as lack of oxygen and the presence of infectious organisms. On all counts, the planet had passed muster. The sun, whiter than Sol, was almost hot enough to make him forget the chill he carried deep inside him. Almost, but not quite, especially as the air, though breathable, was thin and deficient in nitrogen. The countryside was bleak, inspiring in him the thought that there are two kinds of desolation; the one that precedes the coming of Man, and the one which he knows only too well how to create wherever he goes. The desolation here was non-human.
"It--it's like a cemetery, ain't it, Pop?"
Sam looked at his son sharply. Kids of ten were not supposed to know much about cemeteries. Nor, for that matter, were kids of six, Mark's age when the funeral had taken place. Sam hadn't let him attend, but evidently the incident had made a deeper impression on his mind than Sam had realized. He would always remember a cemetery as the place where his mother lived. Perhaps he missed Rhoda almost as much as his father did.
"It's different from a cemetery," said Sam. "There's nobody buried here. Looks like we're the first human beings ever to set foot on this place."
"Do you think we'll find animals to catch, Pop?"
"I don't see signs of any animals."
That was part of Sam's private fiction, that he was looking for strange animals to be sold to zoos or circuses. Actually he was seeking less to find anything new than to lose something he carried with him, and succeeding in neither attempt.
Mark shivered in the sun. "It's kind of lonely," he said.
"More lonely than the ship?"
"It's different. It's bigger, so it's more lonely."
I'm not so sure, argued Sam mentally. In the ship, we have all of space around us, and nothing's bigger than that. Still, your opinion has to be respected. You're almost as great an expert on the various kinds of loneliness as I am. The difference is that you're loneliest when you're away from people. I'm loneliest in a crowd. That's why I don't mind this planet so much.
He walked ahead, Mark following almost reluctantly. The ground was rocky and the shrub-like vegetation sparse and stunted, ranging in color from greenish gray to brown. It seemed hardly capable of supporting a large animal population. If there were any animals here at all, they were probably too small to be impressive, and would be of little interest to exhibitors.
They walked in silence for a few moments, and then Sam asked, "Want to go on?"
"I want to finish my studying."
That was something new. "Okay," said Sam, and turned back.
* * * * *
They were approaching the ship when the sound of a pebble falling came to Sam's ears. Automatically, his hand reached for his gun, and he swung around to face what might be danger. As he did so, something snarled and fled. He could see no sign of motion, but he could hear the scattering of other pebbles along a gully as the creature retreated.
"Looks like we're not alone here, after all," he said. "Wonder what that was."
"It couldn't have been very big," said Mark. "Big animals don't run away."
"Not usually, unless they're smart, or they've met people before. I'll have to set traps."
"Do you think maybe if you caught him you could sell him to a circus, Pop?"
"I'll have to see what he's like, first," said Sam. He looked around. "If there's one animal, there are likely to be others. It's strange that I didn't detect any sign of them."
He put his arm absently over Mark's shoulder. He didn't notice the expression on the kid's face at this unexpected gesture.
When they were inside the ship again, Mark said, "Guess I'd better get back to my arithmetic."
"In a minute," said Sam. "I want to talk to you first." He dropped wearily into a seat, although he had done nothing that should have tired him out. His son looked at him expectantly. "Mark, do you like traveling around with me?"
"Sure, Pop, I like to be with you."
"Not seeing anybody else? No other kids, no people of any kind? Just being with me, learning your lessons from tapes, and having your test papers corrected automatically? You don't get tired of it?"
Mark hesitated despite himself. Then he said loyally, "I'd rather be with you than anybody else. When Mom--when Mom died--I didn't want to see anybody."
"I know how you felt. But that was four years ago. You can't grow up alone. Now what you need to do is meet people, learn how they talk and think and feel. You can't learn those things from tapes, and you can't learn them from me."
Mark said stubbornly, "I like to be with you."
"I'm not much of a person to be with. Don't think I don't know it. I'm mean and surly, and my temper's getting worse by the day. I can't associate with people any more. But you can. I was thinking maybe I'd leave you--"
"No!" cried Mark.
"Not in an orphanage or anything like that. But I have some friends whose kids are growing up--"
"No. I won't go. If you send me, I'll run away. I want to be with you."
"Okay," said Sam. "That's that."
But it wasn't, and he knew it. Even as he went about preparing his traps, he knew it.
* * * * *
As it turned out, the only animals he caught in his traps were small ones which tore themselves in two and then scampered off, each half running in a different direction. For the animal which had made those noises, no traps were necessary. Later on he heard a noise outside again, and he went out cautiously, gun in hand. The animal backed away, but he saw it, then he heard it bark. So did Mark, who had followed him.
Mark's eyes almost popped. It was four years since he had heard the sound, but he knew at once what it was. "Gosh! A dog! How do you s'pose he got here?"
"I don't know," said Sam. "Your guess is as good as mine."
"But if we're the first human beings to land here--it ain't possible!"
"I know that. But there he is."
At the sound of their voices, the dog broke into a series of furious barks, backing away as it did so.
"What kind is he, Pop?"
"He looks like a mongrel to me. A bad-tempered, medium-sized mongrel with an ugly look about him. Maybe I ought to shoot him and get it over with."
"Shoot him? Don't do that! I want him as a pet."
"He looks too wild to make much of a pet."
The dog gave one last bark of defiance, turned, and fled in the same general direction, Sam noticed, as he had run last time.
"Maybe dogs do grow on other planets, Pop."
"Only if men have brought them there."
"Then that means there was a ship here?"
"At some time or other there was a ship. I don't think it was smashed up, or I'd have seen wreckage when I cruised around before landing. That dog was either left here by mistake, or deliberately marooned."
"Maybe--maybe he's with somebody who's still here."
"Not likely," said Sam thoughtfully. "He wanders around too freely, and he seems unused to the presence of human beings. Besides, no men would be likely to live here long without shelter. And I've seen no sign of any house or hut."
"Could he belong to a being that wasn't human?"
"No," replied Sam with certainty. "Only human beings have been able to domesticate dogs. If a dog is here, a human being was once here. That's definite."
"He would make a good pet," said Mark longingly.
"Not that one. Maybe I should have got you a dog long ago. It might have been just the kind of companionship you needed. But you can't make a pet of this animal. He's been away from people too long, and he's developed some mean habits." And he added mentally, "Like me."
"I could train him," said Mark. "He wouldn't be any trouble at all, Pop. I'd train him and feed him, and he'd be just like one of us. And--and like you say, Pop, it wouldn't be so lonely for me."
Kids don't give up easily, thought Sam. All the same, he had an idea that with this dog all the persistence in the world would be useless. He shrugged, and said simply, "We'll see." And then they went into the ship to eat.
* * * * *
All through the meal he could tell that Mark was thinking about the dog. The boy's thoughts seemed to affect his appetite. For the first time, he left some of his proteinex on the plate.
"I'm not very hungry today," he said apologetically. "Maybe--" He looked inquiringly at his father.
"Go ahead and finish it," said Sam. "We've got plenty of food. I'll fix up something else for the dog."
"But I want to feed him myself, Pop. I want him to get used to me feeding him."
"I'll give you your chance later."
Afterwards, Sam thriftily opened an old can of a less expensive variety of proteinex and put half of it on a platter, which Mark carried outside the ship. He moved off about a hundred yards in the direction the dog had taken, and set the platter down on a rock.
"The wind is blowing the wrong way," said Sam. "Let's wait a while."
* * * * *
In ten minutes the wind shifted, and if the dog was near, Sam felt certain that he had picked up both their scent and that of the food. That his feeling was correct was shown by the sudden appearance of the animal, who barked again, but this time not so fiercely. And he stopped barking to sniff hungrily, at the same time keeping his distance.
"Here, mutt," called Mark.
"I'm afraid he won't come any closer while we're around," said Sam. "If you want him to have that food, you'd better go away from it."
Mark reluctantly backed away with his father. The dog approached the food, finally rushing down upon it as if he feared it would escape, and gobbled it.
In the days that followed, they continued to feed him, and the animal became relatively tame. He stopped barking at them, and at times let Mark come within a few feet of him. But he never allowed Mark to come close enough to touch him, and he was especially wary of Sam. The latter could see, however, that there was nothing around the smooth-furred neck. The collar, if it had ever existed, had evidently been worn away.
"So we can't find out what his name is," said Mark in disappointment. "Here, Prince, here, Spot, here, Rover--"
The animal answered to none of the traditional dog names, nor to several of the newer ones that Mark recalled.
After the dog had been with them for a half hour or so he usually trotted off in the direction of what they had come to consider his lair.
"He doesn't seem to be getting tame enough for a pet," said Sam. "That's one idea I'm afraid you'll have to give up."
"All he needs is a little more time," said Mark. "He's getting used to me." Then a sudden fear struck him, and he added, "You're not going to leave here yet, are you, Pop? I thought you wanted to catch some big animals."
"There aren't any other big animals," replied Sam. "Just those small ones who came apart in the traps, and they're not worth catching. But I'll stay. This place is as good as any other. I won't leave it yet."
* * * * *
In fact, the stay on the planet, bleak as the place was, seemed to be less unpleasant than cruising aimlessly through space. Mark had been starved for companionship of someone besides his father, and in a way, without making too many demands, the dog was a companion. Wondering about the beast and trying to tame him gave them something with which to occupy their minds. It had been several days, realized Sam, since he had last snapped at Mark.
It had become quite certain now that there was no other human being around. The dog's eagerness for the food showed that no one else had taken care of him for a long time. Evidently he had been forced to feed himself on the small and elusive native animals which he could run down.
One of the things that puzzled Sam was the dog's obvious anxiety to leave the neighborhood of the ship after a short period and return to his lair. And one day, driven by curiosity, Sam followed him, with Mark coming along, too.
The dog had become sufficiently accustomed to them by now not to resent their presence, and it was easy to keep him in sight. He led the way for at least two miles, over rocky ground and past a small stream. Quite unexpectedly he stopped and began to whine and sniff the ground. As Sam and Mark approached, he turned on them, barking furiously.
The man and boy exchanged glances. "He's acting just like he did in the beginning," said Mark.
"There's something in the ground," said Sam. "I'm going to find out what it is." And he drew his gun.
"You're not going to kill him, Pop!"
"I'll just put him to sleep. An anaesthetic pellet of the kind I use for trapping ought to do the trick."
But one pellet turned out to be not enough. It required the bursting of three pellets before the animal finally trembled, came to a halt, and with eyes glazed, fell over on the ground.
When they approached closer, Sam caught sight of half a dozen stones, roughly piled together. He said, "Better get back, Mark. This may not be pleasant."
"You think--you think somebody's buried here?"
"Very likely. I'm going to see."
* * * * *
Using a flat rock with a sharp edge as an improvised spade, he began to dig. The ground was hard, and the rock was not the best of tools. It took him half an hour to reach the first bone, and another half-hour to uncover the rest.
Mark had come up behind him and was watching with no sign of revulsion. He said, "I--I was afraid there might be a body, Pop."
"So was I. It looks as if the man died so long ago that everything else has rotted away, except for a few metal clasps. No other sign of shoes or clothes. And no indication of how this happened."
"You think he was the dog's master?"
"Evidently."
They both stared at the sleeping animal. Then Sam shrugged, and began to fill the shallow grave again. Mark helped him push in the dirt and stamp it down into place. Finally they moved the stones back.
They were about to leave when Mark cried out, "Look at that rock!"
Staring where his son pointed, Sam saw a gray column about four feet high, with four smooth lateral sides. Rectangular prisms of this size were rare in nature. This was obviously the work of human hands, and of a blasting rod as well, to judge by the sides, which showed evidence of having been fused before weathering had cut into them. At first he had thought the column was a gravestone. But there was no inscription upon it. There was nothing but a thin deep groove that ran horizontally around the four sides, several inches from the top.
"What does it mean, Pop?"
"Let's find out. It's obviously been put here as some sort of memorial. As for this groove--"
He put his hands on the top of the stone and lifted. As he had half expected, it separated at the horizontal groove. The top of the stone was the lid of a box. Inside lay a plastic container.
"Some kind of plastic we don't make any more," muttered Sam.
"Aren't you going to open it?" asked Mark eagerly. "Maybe it tells about the grave and the dog's name."
The plastic came open at a slight tug. Inside were several strong sheets of paper. Sam stared at them and said, "It's writing, sure enough. But in some language I don't understand."
"We can put it in our mechanical translator," said Mark. "That can tell us what it means."
"That's what we'll do."
"Aren't we going to take the dog with us, Pop?"
"No, we'll leave him here. He'll come to in a little while."
* * * * *
Walking back to their ship, Mark continued to show an excitement that was unusual for him. "You know what?" he said. "I'll bet we're going to learn what the dog's name is."
"I doubt if whoever wrote this thing would bother about a trifle like that."
"But that's important. You'll see, Pop, you'll see!"
At the ship, Sam inserted the sheets into the reader section of his translator and started the motor. The selector swung into action.
"Before it can translate, it has to decide what language this is," he explained.
"Will that take long?"
"A few minutes if we're lucky, a couple of hours if we're not. After that, I think the translation itself shouldn't take more than a few minutes. While we're waiting, we might as well eat."
"I'm not hungry," said Mark.
"You'd better eat anyway."
"Just a little bit, maybe. You know what I think, Pop? When I call the dog by his name, he'll know I'm his friend and he'll come to me. Then he'll really be my pet."
"Don't count too much on it," said Sam. And thought once more how lonely his son must be, to center so much hope in a half-wild beast.
A light glowed suddenly in the translator. The selector had found the proper language. Now it began to translate.
Twenty minutes later, its work had been completed. As Sam silently began to read, Mark bumped against him, knocking the translation from his hand. Sam's first reaction was anger at the boy's clumsiness. Then he became aware of the hope and the fear that lay behind Mark's excitement, and bit back the angry words which had almost reached his lips.
"Easy, Mark, easy," he said. He picked up the translation again and sat down. "You can read it over my shoulder, if you want to."
"I just want to find out the dog's name."
"The important thing is his master's name. Julian Hagstrom, it says. And he was on a spaceship with his brother, Raoul."
Mark's eyes had skipped ahead. "Look, Pop, here's the dog's name--Arkem! I never heard of a dog having a name like that! What does it mean?"
"I wouldn't know," muttered Sam absently, still reading.
But Mark wasn't actually interested in his answer. He ran outside. "Arkem!" he called. "Arkem!"
There was nothing he could interpret as an answer. After a moment or two he came into the ship again, his face betraying his disappointment. "I guess he doesn't hear me. He's too far away."
Sam nodded. He had put the translation down and was staring straight ahead of him, as if looking through the ship's side.
"Is anything the matter, Pop?"
"What? Oh, no, nothing's the matter. I was just thinking about what I read here."
"They had an accident, didn't they? How did it happen?"
* * * * *
"It happened because their ship wasn't as good as ours. Julian Hagstrom, the man who was killed, was buried here by his brother. Raoul put this record in the stone to mark his grave. I think he also engraved something on the stone itself. But that's been worn away."
"It must have been a long time ago. Maybe years."
"Yes, it was years ago. After he buried Julian, Raoul tried to make repairs, and headed in a direction where he hoped he'd find a civilized planet. He never made it."
"How can you know that? He wrote the paper before he started out."
"If he had made it, we'd have heard of him. We'd certainly have heard of him." Sam's face was bleak. "And Rhoda--your mother--would still be alive."
Mark looked puzzled, and stared at the translation once more. "It says here he tried to re-reverse the aging process. What does that mean? And what's immortality, Pop?"
"Something he and his brother were looking for. Something to keep people from ever dying. They had a ship full of dogs and other animals. All died in their experiments--all but Arkem. They had high hopes of Arkem. He lived through a number of different treatments and became quite a pet of Julian's. Then came the crash. Their method wasn't proof against accidental death, and at any rate they hadn't applied it yet to themselves.
"After Raoul buried his brother, the dog was miserable, and howled so much that Raoul decided to leave him behind. He was helped to reach this decision by the fact that the ship had lost much of its air in the accident, and he knew that the air-purifying mechanism wasn't working too well. He figured he'd have a better chance of surviving if he stayed in the ship alone. But it didn't do him any good. He was lost in space, or we'd certainly have heard of him."
From outside there came the sound of a low growl. "It's Arkem!" cried Mark. "Now you'll see. Wait till he hears me call his name."
He ran out, and Sam followed slowly. "Don't expect too much, Mark," he said, almost with pity.
Mark didn't hear him. "Arkem!" he called. "Arkem! Arkem!"
The dog was watchful, keeping his distance and giving no sign of recognition. Sam put his arm around his son's shoulder.
"Arkem, Arkem! Here, Arkem!"
The dog snarled.
* * * * *
There were tears in the boy's eyes. "He doesn't know his own name! He doesn't even know his own name! Arkem!"
"It's no use, Mark, he's forgotten he ever had a name. I'm afraid you'd better give up the idea of having him as a pet."
"But you can't forget your own name!"
"You can in eight hundred years. Yes, Mark, that's when all this happened, eight hundred years ago. That's why the language had to be translated. Arkem is immortal. And during his long life he's forgotten not only his name, but the master for whose sake he was marooned here. If Julian Hagstrom were, by some miracle, to come back to life, I'm sure the dog wouldn't remember him. All he has is a vague but strong tie to that heap of stones. He no longer knows why he's protecting it. He's been away from live human beings so long that his brain is little more than a bundle of reflexes and instincts."
"I'll train him," said Mark. "Sometimes you forget a thing at first, but it comes back to you later. He'll remember his name--here, Arkem!"
"It's no use," said Sam. "For eight hundred years he's been tied to that heap of stones. He'll never remember anything except that fact. I'll get you another dog for a pet."
"You mean we're going back to Mars or Earth?"
"Some place like that. Some place where there are people. Being alone in space is no good for you."
"Oh, no, Pop, you can't get rid of me like that."
"I'm not trying to get rid of you," said Sam. "Being alone in space is no good for me either. I'm going with you."
"Gee, are you sure? You won't change your mind?"
The delighted but uncertain look on his son's face shook Sam. He said carefully, "I won't change my mind. I've decided that it's possible to have too much of a good thing. If grief is a good thing."
Suddenly, for no reason that they could detect, the dog barked at them and backed away, the fur rising in an angry ridge along his back.
"Couldn't we take him along anyway?" asked Mark. "I don't like to think of him all alone here, year after year."
"He'll be miserable here, but he'd be more miserable away from his heap of dirt and stones. Perhaps--" Mark didn't see as Sam pulled his gun, then let it slip back into place. "No. That's none of my business. Maybe he'll be fortunate and have an accident."
"What did you say, Pop?"
"Nothing much. Come along, Mark. We're heading for civilization."
An hour later, the ship rose into the air. Through the blasting of the rockets, Sam thought--imagined, he decided, was a better word--that he heard the long doleful whine of a creature whose mindless grief was doomed to last for all eternity.
TREES ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM
By Arthur Dekker Savage
The trees on Mars are few and stunted, says old Doc Yoris. There's plenty of gold, of course--but trees can be much more important!
You might say the trouble started at the Ivy, which is a moving picture house in Cave Junction built like a big quonset. It's the only show in these parts, and most of us old-timers up here in the timber country of southwest Oregon have got into the habit of going to see a picture on Saturday nights before we head for a tavern.
But I don't think old Doc Yoris, who was there with Lew and Rusty and me, had been to more than two or three shows in his life. Doc is kind of sensitive about his appearance on account of his small eyes and big nose and ears; and since gold mining gave way to logging and lumber mills, with Outsiders drifting into the country, Doc has taken to staying on his homestead away back up along Deer Creek, near the boundary of the Siskiyou National Forest. It's gotten so he'll come to Cave Junction only after dark, and even then he wears dark glasses so strangers won't notice him too much.
I couldn't see anything funny about the picture when Doc started laughing, but I figure it's a man's own business when he wants to laugh, so I didn't say anything. The show was one of these scientific things, and when Doc began to cackle it was showing some men getting out of a rocket ship on Mars and running over to look at some trees.
Rusty, who's top choker setter in our logging outfit, was trying to see Doc's point. He can snare logs with a hunk of steel cable faster than anyone I know, but he's never had much schooling. He turned to Doc. "I don't get it, Doc," he said. "What's the deal?"
Doc kept chuckling. "It's them trees," he said. "There's no trees like that on Mars."
"Oh," said Rusty.
I suppose it was just chance that Burt Holden was sitting behind us and heard the talk. Burt is one of the newcomers. He'd come down from Grants Pass and started a big lumber mill and logging outfit, and was trying to freeze out the little operators.
He growled something about keeping quiet. That got Rusty and Lew kind of mad, and Lew turned around and looked at Burt. Lew is even bigger than Burt, and things might have got interesting, but I wanted to see the rest of the picture. I nudged him and asked him if he had a chew. They won't let you smoke in the show, but it's okay to chew, and most of us were in the habit anyway, because there's too much danger of forest fire when you smoke on the job.
Doc laughed every time the screen showed trees, and I could hear Burt humping around in his seat like he was irritated.
* * * * *
At the end of the show we drifted over to the Owl Tavern and took a table against the north wall, behind the pool tables and across from the bar. Doc had put his dark glasses back on, and he sat facing the wall.
Not that many people apart from the Insiders knew Doc. He hadn't been very active since the young medical doctor had come to Cave Junction in 1948, although he never turned down anyone who came for help, and as far as I knew he'd never lost a patient unless he was already dead when Doc got there.
We were kidding Lew because he was still wearing his tin hat and caulked boots from work. "You figuring on starting early in the morning?" I asked him. Rusty and Doc laughed. It was a good joke because we rode out to the job in my jeep, and so we'd naturally get there at the same time.
Then Rusty sat up straighter and looked over at the bar. "Hey," he said, "Pop's talking to Burt Holden." Pop Johnson owns our outfit. He's one of the small operators that guys like Burt are trying to squeeze out.
"Hope he don't try to rook Pop into no deals," said Lew.
Doc tipped up his bottle of beer. In Oregon they don't sell anything but beer in the taverns. "Times change," he said. "Back in 1900 all they wanted was gold. Now they're trying to take all the trees."
"It's the big operators like Burt," I said. "Little guys like Pop can't cut 'em as fast as they grow. The companies don't have to reseed, either, except on National Forest land."
"That Burt Holden was up to my place couple weeks ago," said Doc. "Darn near caught me skinning out a deer."
"He better not yap to the game warden," said Rusty. "Them laws is for sports and Outsiders, not us guys who need the meat."
"He wanted to buy all my timber," said Doc. "Offered me ten dollars a thousand board feet, on the stump."
"Don't sell," I advised him. "If Burt offers that much, almost anyone else will pay twelve."
Doc looked at me. "I'd never sell my trees. Not at any price. I got a hundred and sixty acres of virgin stand, and that's the way it's gonna stay. I cut up the windfalls and snags for firewood, and that's all."
"Here comes Pop," said Lew.
Pop sat down with us and had a beer. He looked worried. We didn't ask him any questions, because we figure a man will talk if he wants to, and if he doesn't it's his own business.
He finally unlimbered. "Burt Holden wants to buy the mill," he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
"Buy your mill?" said Lew. "Hell, his mill is five times as big, and he's even got a burner to take care of slashings, so he don't have to shut down in the fire season."
"He just wants the land," said Pop, "because it's near the highway. He wants to tear down my setup and build a pulp mill."
"A pulp mill!" If we could have seen Doc's eyes through the glasses I imagine they'd have been popped open a full half inch. "Why, then they'll be cutting down everything but the brush!"
Pop nodded. "Yeah. Size of a log don't matter when you make paper--just so it's wood."
It seemed as though Doc was talking to himself. "They'll strip the land down bare," he mumbled. "And the hills will wash away, and the chemicals they use in the mill will kill the fish in the creeks and the Illinois River."
"That's why they won't let anyone start a pulp mill near Grants Pass," said Pop. "Most of the town's money comes from sports who come up to the Rogue River to fish."
Rusty set his jaw. "In the winter we need them fish," he said. He was right, too. The woods close down in the winter, on account of the snow, and if a man can't hunt and fish he's liable to get kind of hungry. That rocking chair money doesn't stretch very far.
"I ain't gonna sell," said Pop. "But that won't stop Burt Holden, and any place he builds the mill around here will drain into the Illinois."
Doc pushed back his chair and stood up to his full height of five foot four. "I'm gonna talk to Burt Holden," he said.
Rusty stood up to his six foot three. "I'll bring him over here, Doc," he said. "We're handy to the cue rack here, and Lew and Simmons can keep them guys he's with off my back."
I stood up and shoved Rusty back down. I'm no taller than he is, but I outweigh him about twenty pounds. I started working in the woods when we still felled trees with axes and misery whips--crosscut saws to the Outsiders. "I'll go get him," I said. "You're still mad about the show, and you wouldn't be able to get him this far without mussing him up."
"There won't be no trouble," said Doc. "I just want to make him an offer."
* * * * *
I went over and told Burt that Doc wanted to talk to him. The three guys with him followed us back to the table.
Burt figured he knew what it was all about, and he just stood over Doc and looked down on him. "If it's about your timber, Yoris," he said, "I'll take it, but I can't pay you more than nine dollars now. Lumber's coming down, and I'm taking a chance even at that." He rocked back and forth on his heels and looked at Pop as though daring him to say different.
"I still don't want to sell, Mr. Holden," said Doc. "But I've got better than three million feet on my place, and I'll give it to you if you won't put a pulp mill anywhere in the Illinois Valley."
We were all floored at that, but Burt recovered first. He gave a nasty laugh. "Not interested, Yoris. If you want to sell, look me up."
"Wait!" said Doc. "A pulp mill will take every tree in the Valley. In a few years--"
"It'll make money, too," said Burt flatly.
"Money ain't everything by a long shot. It won't buy trees and creeks and rain."
"It'll buy trees to make lumber." Burt was getting mad. "I don't want any opposition from you, Yoris. I've had enough trouble from people who try to hold back progress. If you don't like the way we run things here, you can--hell, you can go back to Mars!"
It seemed to me that it was just about time to start in. I could have taken Burt easiest, but I knew Rusty would probably swing on him first and get in my way, so I planned to work on the two guys on Burt's right, leaving the one on his left for Lew. I didn't want Pop to get tangled up in it.
I don't generally wait too long after I make up my mind, but then I noticed Rusty reaching out slowly for a cue stick, and I thought maybe I'd better take Burt first, while Rusty got set. I never did see a guy so one way about having something in his hands.
But Doc didn't drop out. "There ain't nothing but a few scrub trees on Mars," he said to Burt, looking him square in the eye. "And no creeks and no rain."
Burt curled his lip sarcastically. "The hell you say! Is that why you didn't like it there?" You could see he was just trying to egg Doc into saying he'd come from Mars, so he could give him the horse laugh. The guys he was with were getting set for a fracas, but they were waiting for Burt to lead off.
Doc didn't get caught. "But there's gold," he said, like he hadn't heard Burt at all. "Tons of it--laying all over the ground."
I guess Burt decided to ride along. "Okay, Yoris," he said. "Tell you what I'll do. For only one ton of Martian gold I'll agree to drop all plans for a pulp mill, here or anywhere else. In fact, I'll get out of business altogether."
Doc moved in like a log falling out of the loading tongs. "That's a deal," he said. "You ready to go?"
Burt started to look disgusted, then he smiled. "Sure. Mars must be quite a place if you came from there."
"Okay," said Doc. "You just stand up against the wall, Mr. Holden." Burt's smile faded. He figured Doc was trying to maneuver him into a likely position for us. But Doc cleared that up quick. "You boys get up and stand aside," he ordered. "Get back a ways and give Mr. Holden plenty of room." We didn't like it, but we cleared out from around the table. A bunch from the bar and pool tables, sensing something was up, came drifting over to watch. I could feel tension building up. "Now," said Doc, pointing, "you just stand right over there, Mr. Holden, and fold your arms."
Burt didn't like the audience, and I guess he figured his plans were backfiring when Doc didn't bluff. "You hill-happy old coot," he snarled. "You'd better go home and sleep it off!" I grabbed hold of Lew's arm and shook my head at Rusty. I wasn't going to interfere with Doc now.
"You're not scared, are you, Mr. Holden?" said Doc quietly. "Just you stand against the wall and take it easy. It won't hurt a bit."
* * * * *
Burt Holden was plenty tough for an Outsider, and a hard-headed businessman to boot, but he'd never run into a customer like Doc before. You could see him trying to make up his mind on how to handle this thing. He glanced around quick at the crowd, and I could tell he decided to play it out to where Doc would have to draw in his horns. He actually grinned, for the effect it would have on everybody watching. "All right, Yoris," he said. He backed against the wall and folded his arms. "But hadn't you better stand up here with me?"
"I ain't going," said Doc. "I don't like Mars. But you won't have no trouble getting your gold. There's nuggets the size of your fist laying all over the dry river beds."
"I hate to be nosey," said Burt, playing to the crowd, "but how are you going to get me there?"
"With his head, o'course!" blurted Rusty before I could stop him. "Just like he cures you when you're sick!" Doc had pulled Rusty through two or three bad kid sicknesses--and a lot of the rest of us, too.
"Yep," said Doc. "A man don't need one of them rocket things to get between here and Mars. Fact is, I never seen one."
Burt looked at the ceiling like he was a martyr, then back at Doc. "Well, Yoris," he said in a tone that meant he was just about through humoring him, "I'm waiting. Can you send me there or can't you?" The start of a nasty smile was beginning to show at the corners of his mouth.
"Sure," said Doc. He slumped down in his chair and cupped his hands lightly around his dark glasses. I noticed his fingers trembling a little against his forehead.
The lights dimmed, flickered and went out, and we waited for the bartender to put in a new fuse. The power around here doesn't go haywire except in the winter, when trees fall across the lines. A small fight started over in a corner.
When the lights came back on, Doc and Pop started for the door, and Lew and Rusty and I followed. Burt's buddies were looking kind of puzzled, and a few old-timers were moving over to watch the fight. The rest were heading back to the bar.
Rusty piled into the jeep with Doc and me. "When you going to bring him back, Doc?" he asked when we started moving.
"Dunno," said Doc. He took off his glasses to watch me shift gears. He's been after me for a long time to teach him how to drive. "It only works on a man once."
THE END
AN INCIDENT ON ROUTE 12
by JAMES H. SCHMITZ
He was already a thief, prepared to steal again. He didn't know that he himself was only booty!
Phil Garfield was thirty miles south of the little town of Redmon on Route Twelve when he was startled by a series of sharp, clanking noises. They came from under the Packard's hood.
The car immediately began to lose speed. Garfield jammed down the accelerator, had a sense of sick helplessness at the complete lack of response from the motor. The Packard rolled on, getting rid of its momentum, and came to a stop.
Phil Garfield swore shakily. He checked his watch, switched off the headlights and climbed out into the dark road. A delay of even half an hour here might be disastrous. It was past midnight, and he had another hundred and ten miles to cover to reach the small private airfield where Madge waited for him and the thirty thousand dollars in the suitcase on the Packard's front seat.
If he didn't make it before daylight....
He thought of the bank guard. The man had made a clumsy play at being a hero, and that had set off the fool woman who'd run screaming into their line of fire. One dead. Perhaps two. Garfield hadn't stopped to look at an evening paper.
But he knew they were hunting for him.
He glanced up and down the road. No other headlights in sight at the moment, no light from a building showing on the forested hills. He reached back into the car and brought out the suitcase, his gun, a big flashlight and the box of shells which had been standing beside the suitcase. He broke the box open, shoved a handful of shells and the .38 into his coat pocket, then took suitcase and flashlight over to the shoulder of the road and set them down.
There was no point in groping about under the Packard's hood. When it came to mechanics, Phil Garfield was a moron and well aware of it. The car was useless to him now ... except as bait.
But as bait it might be very useful.
Should he leave it standing where it was? No, Garfield decided. To anybody driving past it would merely suggest a necking party, or a drunk sleeping off his load before continuing home. He might have to wait an hour or more before someone decided to stop. He didn't have the time. He reached in through the window, hauled the top of the steering wheel towards him and put his weight against the rear window frame.
The Packard began to move slowly backwards at a slant across the road. In a minute or two he had it in position. Not blocking the road entirely, which would arouse immediate suspicion, but angled across it, lights out, empty, both front doors open and inviting a passerby's investigation.
Garfield carried the suitcase and flashlight across the right-hand shoulder of the road and moved up among the trees and undergrowth of the slope above the shoulder. Placing the suitcase between the bushes, he brought out the .38, clicked the safety off and stood waiting.
Some ten minutes later, a set of headlights appeared speeding up Route Twelve from the direction of Redmon. Phil Garfield went down on one knee before he came within range of the lights. Now he was completely concealed by the vegetation.
The car slowed as it approached, braking nearly to a stop sixty feet from the stalled Packard. There were several people inside it; Garfield heard voices, then a woman's loud laugh. The driver tapped his horn inquiringly twice, moved the car slowly forward. As the headlights went past him, Garfield got to his feet among the bushes, took a step down towards the road, raising the gun.
Then he caught the distant gleam of a second set of headlights approaching from Redmon. He swore under his breath and dropped back out of sight. The car below him reached the Packard, edged cautiously around it, rolled on with a sudden roar of acceleration.
* * * * *
The second car stopped when still a hundred yards away, the Packard caught in the motionless glare of its lights. Garfield heard the steady purring of a powerful motor.
For almost a minute, nothing else happened. Then the car came gliding smoothly on, stopped again no more than thirty feet to Garfield's left. He could see it now through the screening bushes--a big job, a long, low four-door sedan. The motor continued to purr. After a moment, a door on the far side of the car opened and slammed shut.
A man walked quickly out into the beam of the headlights and started towards the Packard.
Phil Garfield rose from his crouching position, the .38 in his right hand, flashlight in his left. If the driver was alone, the thing was now cinched! But if there was somebody else in the car, somebody capable of fast, decisive action, a slip in the next ten seconds might cost him the sedan, and quite probably his freedom and life. Garfield lined up the .38's sights steadily on the center of the approaching man's head. He let his breath out slowly as the fellow came level with him in the road and squeezed off one shot.
Instantly he went bounding down the slope to the road. The bullet had flung the man sideways to the pavement. Garfield darted past him to the left, crossed the beam of the headlights, and was in darkness again on the far side of the road, snapping on his flashlight as he sprinted up to the car.
The motor hummed quietly on. The flashlight showed the seats empty. Garfield dropped the light, jerked both doors open in turn, gun pointing into the car's interior. Then he stood still for a moment, weak and almost dizzy with relief.
There was no one inside. The sedan was his.
The man he had shot through the head lay face down on the road, his hat flung a dozen feet away from him. Route Twelve still stretched out in dark silence to east and west. There should be time enough to clean up the job before anyone else came along. Garfield brought the suitcase down and put it on the front seat of the sedan, then started back to get his victim off the road and out of sight. He scaled the man's hat into the bushes, bent down, grasped the ankles and started to haul him towards the left side of the road where the ground dropped off sharply beyond the shoulder.
The body made a high, squealing sound and began to writhe violently.
* * * * *
Shocked, Garfield dropped the legs and hurriedly took the gun from his pocket, moving back a step. The squealing noise rose in intensity as the wounded man quickly flopped over twice like a struggling fish, arms and legs sawing about with startling energy. Garfield clicked off the safety, pumped three shots into his victim's back.
The grisly squeals ended abruptly. The body continued to jerk for another second or two, then lay still.
Garfield shoved the gun back into his pocket. The unexpected interruption had unnerved him; his hands shook as he reached down again for the stranger's ankles. Then he jerked his hands back, and straightened up, staring.
From the side of the man's chest, a few inches below the right arm, something like a thick black stick, three feet long, protruded now through the material of the coat.
It shone, gleaming wetly, in the light from the car. Even in that first uncomprehending instant, something in its appearance brought a surge of sick disgust to Garfield's throat. Then the stick bent slowly halfway down its length, forming a sharp angle, and its tip opened into what could have been three blunt, black claws which scrabbled clumsily against the pavement. Very faintly, the squealing began again, and the body's back arched up as if another sticklike arm were pushing desperately against the ground beneath it.
Garfield acted in a blur of horror. He emptied the .38 into the thing at his feet almost without realizing he was doing it. Then, dropping the gun, he seized one of the ankles, ran backwards to the shoulder of the road, dragging the body behind him.
In the darkness at the edge of the shoulder, he let go of it, stepped around to the other side and with two frantically savage kicks sent the body plunging over the shoulder and down the steep slope beyond. He heard it crash through the bushes for some seconds, then stop. He turned, and ran back to the sedan, scooping up his gun as he went past. He scrambled into the driver's seat and slammed the door shut behind him.
His hands shook violently on the steering wheel as he pressed down the accelerator. The motor roared into life and the big car surged forward. He edged it past the Packard, cursing aloud in horrified shock, jammed down the accelerator and went flashing up Route Twelve, darkness racing beside and behind him.
* * * * *
What had it been? Something that wore what seemed to be a man's body like a suit of clothes, moving the body as a man moves, driving a man's car ... roach-armed, roach-legged itself!
Garfield drew a long, shuddering breath. Then, as he slowed for a curve, there was a spark of reddish light in the rear-view mirror.
He stared at the spark for an instant, braked the car to a stop, rolled down the window and looked back.
Far behind him along Route Twelve, a fire burned. Approximately at the point where the Packard had stalled out, where something had gone rolling off the road into the bushes....
Something, Garfield added mentally, that found fiery automatic destruction when death came to it, so that its secrets would remain unrevealed.
But for him the fire meant the end of a nightmare. He rolled the window up, took out a cigarette, lit it, and pressed the accelerator....
In incredulous fright, he felt the nose of the car tilt upwards, headlights sweeping up from the road into the trees.
Then the headlights winked out. Beyond the windshield, dark tree branches floated down towards him, the night sky beyond. He reached frantically for the door handle.
A steel wrench clamped silently about each of his arms, drawing them in against his sides, immobilizing them there. Garfield gasped, looked up at the mirror and saw a pair of faintly gleaming red eyes watching him from the rear of the car. Two of the things ... the second one stood behind him out of sight, holding him. They'd been in what had seemed to be the trunk compartment. And they had come out.
The eyes in the mirror vanished. A moist, black roach-arm reached over the back of the seat beside Garfield, picked up the cigarette he had dropped, extinguished it with rather horribly human motions, then took up Garfield's gun and drew back out of sight.
He expected a shot, but none came.
One doesn't fire a bullet through the suit one intends to wear....
It wasn't until that thought occurred to him that tough Phil Garfield began to scream. He was still screaming minutes later when, beyond the windshield, the spaceship floated into view among the stars.
END
SURVIVAL TACTICS
By AL SEVCIK
The robots were built to serve Man; to do his work, see to his comforts, make smooth his way. Then the robots figured out an additional service--putting Man out of his misery.
There was a sudden crash that hung sharply in the air, as if a tree had been hit by lightning some distance away. Then another. Alan stopped, puzzled. Two more blasts, quickly together, and the sound of a scream faintly.
Frowning, worrying about the sounds, Alan momentarily forgot to watch his step until his foot suddenly plunged into an ant hill, throwing him to the jungle floor. "Damn!" He cursed again, for the tenth time, and stood uncertainly in the dimness. From tall, moss-shrouded trees, wrist-thick vines hung quietly, scraping the spongy ground like the tentacles of some monstrous tree-bound octopus. Fitful little plants grew straggly in the shadows of the mossy trunks, forming a dense underbrush that made walking difficult. At midday some few of the blue sun's rays filtered through to the jungle floor, but now, late afternoon on the planet, the shadows were long and gloomy.
Alan peered around him at the vine-draped shadows, listening to the soft rustlings and faint twig-snappings of life in the jungle. Two short, popping sounds echoed across the stillness, drowned out almost immediately and silenced by an explosive crash. Alan started, "Blaster fighting! But it can't be!"
Suddenly anxious, he slashed a hurried X in one of the trees to mark his position then turned to follow a line of similar marks back through the jungle. He tried to run, but vines blocked his way and woody shrubs caught at his legs, tripping him and holding him back. Then, through the trees he saw the clearing of the camp site, the temporary home for the scout ship and the eleven men who, with Alan, were the only humans on the jungle planet, Waiamea.
* * * * *
Stepping through the low shrubbery at the edge of the site, he looked across the open area to the two temporary structures, the camp headquarters where the power supplies and the computer were; and the sleeping quarters. Beyond, nose high, stood the silver scout ship that had brought the advance exploratory party of scientists and technicians to Waiamea three days before. Except for a few of the killer robots rolling slowly around the camp site on their quiet treads, there was no one about.
"So, they've finally got those things working." Alan smiled slightly. "Guess that means I owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda for sure. Anybody who can build a robot that hunts by homing in on animals' mind impulses ..." He stepped forward just as a roar of blue flame dissolved the branches of a tree, barely above his head.
Without pausing to think, Alan leaped back, and fell sprawling over a bush just as one of the robots rolled silently up from the right, lowering its blaster barrel to aim directly at his head. Alan froze. "My God, Pete built those things wrong!"
Suddenly a screeching whirlwind of claws and teeth hurled itself from the smoldering branches and crashed against the robot, clawing insanely at the antenna and blaster barrel. With an awkward jerk the robot swung around and fired its blaster, completely dissolving the lower half of the cat creature which had clung across the barrel. But the back pressure of the cat's body overloaded the discharge circuits. The robot started to shake, then clicked sharply as an overload relay snapped and shorted the blaster cells. The killer turned and rolled back towards the camp, leaving Alan alone.
Shakily, Alan crawled a few feet back into the undergrowth where he could lie and watch the camp, but not himself be seen. Though visibility didn't make any difference to the robots, he felt safer, somehow, hidden. He knew now what the shooting sounds had been and why there hadn't been anyone around the camp site. A charred blob lying in the grass of the clearing confirmed his hypothesis. His stomach felt sick.
"I suppose," he muttered to himself, "that Pete assembled these robots in a batch and then activated them all at once, probably never living to realize that they're tuned to pick up human brain waves, too. Damn! Damn!" His eyes blurred and he slammed his fist into the soft earth.
When he raised his eyes again the jungle was perceptibly darker. Stealthy rustlings in the shadows grew louder with the setting sun. Branches snapped unaccountably in the trees overhead and every now and then leaves or a twig fell softly to the ground, close to where he lay. Reaching into his jacket, Alan fingered his pocket blaster. He pulled it out and held it in his right hand. "This pop gun wouldn't even singe a robot, but it just might stop one of those pumas."
Slowly Alan looked around, sizing up his situation. Behind him the dark jungle rustled forbiddingly. He shuddered. "Not a very healthy spot to spend the night. On the other hand, I certainly can't get to the camp with a pack of mind-activated mechanical killers running around. If I can just hold out until morning, when the big ship arrives ... The big ship! Good Lord, Peggy!" He turned white; oily sweat punctuated his forehead. Peggy, arriving tomorrow with the other colonists, the wives and kids! The metal killers, tuned to blast any living flesh, would murder them the instant they stepped from the ship!
* * * * *
A pretty girl, Peggy, the girl he'd married just three weeks ago. He still couldn't believe it. It was crazy, he supposed, to marry a girl and then take off for an unknown planet, with her to follow, to try to create a home in a jungle clearing. Crazy maybe, but Peggy and her green eyes that changed color with the light, with her soft brown hair, and her happy smile, had ended thirty years of loneliness and had, at last, given him a reason for living. "Not to be killed!" Alan unclenched his fists and wiped his palms, bloody where his fingernails had dug into the flesh.
There was a slight creak above him like the protesting of a branch too heavily laden. Blaster ready, Alan rolled over onto his back. In the movement, his elbow struck the top of a small earthy mound and he was instantly engulfed in a swarm of locust-like insects that beat disgustingly against his eyes and mouth. "Fagh!" Waving his arms before his face he jumped up and backwards, away from the bugs. As he did so, a dark shapeless thing plopped from the trees onto the spot where he had been lying stretched out. Then, like an ambient fungus, it slithered off into the jungle undergrowth.
For a split second the jungle stood frozen in a brilliant blue flash, followed by the sharp report of a blaster. Then another. Alan whirled, startled. The planet's double moon had risen and he could see a robot rolling slowly across the clearing in his general direction, blasting indiscriminately at whatever mind impulses came within its pickup range, birds, insects, anything. Six or seven others also left the camp headquarters area and headed for the jungle, each to a slightly different spot.
Apparently the robot hadn't sensed him yet, but Alan didn't know what the effective range of its pickup devices was. He began to slide back into the jungle. Minutes later, looking back he saw that the machine, though several hundred yards away, had altered its course and was now headed directly for him.
His stomach tightened. Panic. The dank, musty smell of the jungle seemed for an instant to thicken and choke in his throat. Then he thought of the big ship landing in the morning, settling down slowly after a lonely two-week voyage. He thought of a brown-haired girl crowding with the others to the gangway, eager to embrace the new planet, and the next instant a charred nothing, unrecognizable, the victim of a design error or a misplaced wire in a machine. "I have to try," he said aloud. "I have to try." He moved into the blackness.
Powerful as a small tank, the killer robot was equipped to crush, slash, and burn its way through undergrowth. Nevertheless, it was slowed by the larger trees and the thick, clinging vines, and Alan found that he could manage to keep ahead of it, barely out of blaster range. Only, the robot didn't get tired. Alan did.
The twin moons cast pale, deceptive shadows that wavered and danced across the jungle floor, hiding debris that tripped him and often sent him sprawling into the dark. Sharp-edged growths tore at his face and clothes, and insects attracted by the blood matted against his pants and shirt. Behind, the robot crashed imperturbably after him, lighting the night with fitful blaster flashes as some winged or legged life came within its range.
There was movement also, in the darkness beside him, scrapings and rustlings and an occasional low, throaty sound like an angry cat. Alan's fingers tensed on his pocket blaster. Swift shadowy forms moved quickly in the shrubs and the growling became suddenly louder. He fired twice, blindly, into the undergrowth. Sharp screams punctuated the electric blue discharge as a pack of small feline creatures leaped snarling and clawing back into the night.
* * * * *
Mentally, Alan tried to figure the charge remaining in his blaster. There wouldn't be much. "Enough for a few more shots, maybe. Why the devil didn't I load in fresh cells this morning!"
The robot crashed on, louder now, gaining on the tired human. Legs aching and bruised, stinging from insect bites, Alan tried to force himself to run holding his hands in front of him like a child in the dark. His foot tripped on a barely visible insect hill and a winged swarm exploded around him. Startled, Alan jerked sideways, crashing his head against a tree. He clutched at the bark for a second, dazed, then his knees buckled. His blaster fell into the shadows.
The robot crashed loudly behind him now. Without stopping to think, Alan fumbled along the ground after his gun, straining his eyes in the darkness. He found it just a couple of feet to one side, against the base of a small bush. Just as his fingers closed upon the barrel his other hand slipped into something sticky that splashed over his forearm. He screamed in pain and leaped back, trying frantically to wipe the clinging, burning blackness off his arm. Patches of black scraped off onto branches and vines, but the rest spread slowly over his arm as agonizing as hot acid, or as flesh being ripped away layer by layer.
Almost blinded by pain, whimpering, Alan stumbled forward. Sharp muscle spasms shot from his shoulder across his back and chest. Tears streamed across his cheeks.
A blue arc slashed at the trees a mere hundred yards behind. He screamed at the blast. "Damn you, Pete! Damn your robots! Damn, damn ... Oh, Peggy!" He stepped into emptiness.
Coolness. Wet. Slowly, washed by the water, the pain began to fall away. He wanted to lie there forever in the dark, cool, wetness. For ever, and ever, and ... The air thundered.
In the dim light he could see the banks of the stream, higher than a man, muddy and loose. Growing right to the edge of the banks, the jungle reached out with hairy, disjointed arms as if to snag even the dirty little stream that passed so timidly through its domain.
Alan, lying in the mud of the stream bed, felt the earth shake as the heavy little robot rolled slowly and inexorably towards him. "The Lord High Executioner," he thought, "in battle dress." He tried to stand but his legs were almost too weak and his arm felt numb. "I'll drown him," he said aloud. "I'll drown the Lord High Executioner." He laughed. Then his mind cleared. He remembered where he was.
* * * * *
Alan trembled. For the first time in his life he understood what it was to live, because for the first time he realized that he would sometime die. In other times and circumstances he might put it off for a while, for months or years, but eventually, as now, he would have to watch, still and helpless, while death came creeping. Then, at thirty, Alan became a man.
"Dammit, no law says I have to flame-out now!" He forced himself to rise, forced his legs to stand, struggling painfully in the shin-deep ooze. He worked his way to the bank and began to dig frenziedly, chest high, about two feet below the edge.
His arm where the black thing had been was swollen and tender, but he forced his hands to dig, dig, dig, cursing and crying to hide the pain, and biting his lips, ignoring the salty taste of blood. The soft earth crumbled under his hands until he had a small cave about three feet deep in the bank. Beyond that the soil was held too tightly by the roots from above and he had to stop.
* * * * *
The air crackled blue and a tree crashed heavily past Alan into the stream. Above him on the bank, silhouetting against the moons, the killer robot stopped and its blaster swivelled slowly down. Frantically, Alan hugged the bank as a shaft of pure electricity arced over him, sliced into the water, and exploded in a cloud of steam. The robot shook for a second, its blaster muzzle lifted erratically and for an instant it seemed almost out of control, then it quieted and the muzzle again pointed down.
Pressing with all his might, Alan slid slowly along the bank inches at a time, away from the machine above. Its muzzle turned to follow him but the edge of the bank blocked its aim. Grinding forward a couple of feet, slightly overhanging the bank, the robot fired again. For a split second Alan seemed engulfed in flame; the heat of hell singed his head and back, and mud boiled in the bank by his arm.
Again the robot trembled. It jerked forward a foot and its blaster swung slightly away. But only for a moment. Then the gun swung back again.
Suddenly, as if sensing something wrong, its tracks slammed into reverse. It stood poised for a second, its treads spinning crazily as the earth collapsed underneath it, where Alan had dug, then it fell with a heavy splash into the mud, ten feet from where Alan stood.
Without hesitation Alan threw himself across the blaster housing, frantically locking his arms around the barrel as the robot's treads churned furiously in the sticky mud, causing it to buck and plunge like a Brahma bull. The treads stopped and the blaster jerked upwards wrenching Alan's arms, then slammed down. Then the whole housing whirled around and around, tilting alternately up and down like a steel-skinned water monster trying to dislodge a tenacious crab, while Alan, arms and legs wrapped tightly around the blaster barrel and housing, pressed fiercely against the robot's metal skin.
Slowly, trying to anticipate and shift his weight with the spinning plunges, Alan worked his hand down to his right hip. He fumbled for the sheath clipped to his belt, found it, and extracted a stubby hunting knife. Sweat and blood in his eyes, hardly able to move on the wildly swinging turret, he felt down the sides to the thin crack between the revolving housing and the stationary portion of the robot. With a quick prayer he jammed in the knife blade--and was whipped headlong into the mud as the turret literally snapped to a stop.
The earth, jungle and moons spun in a pinwheeled blur, slowed, and settled to their proper places. Standing in the sticky, sweet-smelling ooze, Alan eyed the robot apprehensively. Half buried in mud, it stood quiet in the shadowy light except for an occasional, almost spasmodic jerk of its blaster barrel. For the first time that night Alan allowed himself a slight smile. "A blade in the old gear box, eh? How does that feel, boy?"
He turned. "Well, I'd better get out of here before the knife slips or the monster cooks up some more tricks with whatever it's got for a brain." Digging little footholds in the soft bank, he climbed up and stood once again in the rustling jungle darkness.
"I wonder," he thought, "how Pete could cram enough brain into one of those things to make it hunt and track so perfectly." He tried to visualize the computing circuits needed for the operation of its tracking mechanism alone. "There just isn't room for the electronics. You'd need a computer as big as the one at camp headquarters."
* * * * *
In the distance the sky blazed as a blaster roared in the jungle. Then Alan heard the approaching robot, crunching and snapping its way through the undergrowth like an onrushing forest fire. He froze. "Good Lord! They communicate with each other! The one I jammed must be calling others to help."
He began to move along the bank, away from the crashing sounds. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes widened. "Of course! Radio! I'll bet anything they're automatically controlled by the camp computer. That's where their brain is!" He paused. "Then, if that were put out of commission ..." He jerked away from the bank and half ran, half pulled himself through the undergrowth towards the camp.
Trees exploded to his left as another robot fired in his direction, too far away to be effective but churning towards him through the blackness.
Alan changed direction slightly to follow a line between the two robots coming up from either side, behind him. His eyes were well accustomed to the dark now, and he managed to dodge most of the shadowy vines and branches before they could snag or trip him. Even so, he stumbled in the wiry underbrush and his legs were a mass of stinging slashes from ankle to thigh.
The crashing rumble of the killer robots shook the night behind him, nearer sometimes, then falling slightly back, but following constantly, more unshakable than bloodhounds because a man can sometimes cover a scent, but no man can stop his thoughts. Intermittently, like photographers' strobes, blue flashes would light the jungle about him. Then, for seconds afterwards his eyes would see dancing streaks of yellow and sharp multi-colored pinwheels that alternately shrunk and expanded as if in a surrealist's nightmare. Alan would have to pause and squeeze his eyelids tight shut before he could see again, and the robots would move a little closer.
To his right the trees silhouetted briefly against brilliance as a third robot slowly moved up in the distance. Without thinking, Alan turned slightly to the left, then froze in momentary panic. "I should be at the camp now. Damn, what direction am I going?" He tried to think back, to visualize the twists and turns he'd taken in the jungle. "All I need is to get lost."
He pictured the camp computer with no one to stop it, automatically sending its robots in wider and wider forays, slowly wiping every trace of life from the planet. Technologically advanced machines doing the job for which they were built, completely, thoroughly, without feeling, and without human masters to separate sense from futility. Finally parts would wear out, circuits would short, and one by one the killers would crunch to a halt. A few birds would still fly then, but a unique animal life, rare in the universe, would exist no more. And the bones of children, eager girls, and their men would also lie, beside a rusty hulk, beneath the alien sun.
"Peggy!"
As if in answer, a tree beside him breathed fire, then exploded. In the brief flash of the blaster shot, Alan saw the steel glint of a robot only a hundred yards away, much nearer than he had thought. "Thank heaven for trees!" He stepped back, felt his foot catch in something, clutched futilely at some leaves and fell heavily.
Pain danced up his leg as he grabbed his ankle. Quickly he felt the throbbing flesh. "Damn the rotten luck, anyway!" He blinked the pain tears from his eyes and looked up--into a robot's blaster, jutting out of the foliage, thirty yards away.
* * * * *
Instinctively, in one motion Alan grabbed his pocket blaster and fired. To his amazement the robot jerked back, its gun wobbled and started to tilt away. Then, getting itself under control, it swung back again to face Alan. He fired again, and again the robot reacted. It seemed familiar somehow. Then he remembered the robot on the river bank, jiggling and swaying for seconds after each shot. "Of course!" He cursed himself for missing the obvious. "The blaster static blanks out radio transmission from the computer for a few seconds. They even do it to themselves!"
Firing intermittently, he pulled himself upright and hobbled ahead through the bush. The robot shook spasmodically with each shot, its gun tilted upward at an awkward angle.
Then, unexpectedly, Alan saw stars, real stars brilliant in the night sky, and half dragging his swelling leg he stumbled out of the jungle into the camp clearing. Ahead, across fifty yards of grass stood the headquarters building, housing the robot-controlling computer. Still firing at short intervals he started across the clearing, gritting his teeth at every step.
Straining every muscle in spite of the agonizing pain, Alan forced himself to a limping run across the uneven ground, carefully avoiding the insect hills that jutted up through the grass. From the corner of his eye he saw another of the robots standing shakily in the dark edge of the jungle waiting, it seemed, for his small blaster to run dry.
"Be damned! You can't win now!" Alan yelled between blaster shots, almost irrational from the pain that ripped jaggedly through his leg. Then it happened. A few feet from the building's door his blaster quit. A click. A faint hiss when he frantically jerked the trigger again and again, and the spent cells released themselves from the device, falling in the grass at his feet. He dropped the useless gun.
"No!" He threw himself on the ground as a new robot suddenly appeared around the edge of the building a few feet away, aimed, and fired. Air burned over Alan's back and ozone tingled in his nostrils.
Blinding itself for a few seconds with its own blaster static, the robot paused momentarily, jiggling in place. In this instant, Alan jammed his hands into an insect hill and hurled the pile of dirt and insects directly at the robot's antenna. In a flash, hundreds of the winged things erupted angrily from the hole in a swarming cloud, each part of which was a speck of life transmitting mental energy to the robot's pickup devices.
Confused by the sudden dispersion of mind impulses, the robot fired erratically as Alan crouched and raced painfully for the door. It fired again, closer, as he fumbled with the lock release. Jagged bits of plastic and stone ripped past him, torn loose by the blast.
Frantically, Alan slammed open the door as the robot, sensing him strongly now, aimed point blank. He saw nothing, his mind thought of nothing but the red-clad safety switch mounted beside the computer. Time stopped. There was nothing else in the world. He half-jumped, half-fell towards it, slowly, in tenths of seconds that seemed measured out in years.
The universe went black.
Later. Brilliance pressed upon his eyes. Then pain returned, a multi-hurting thing that crawled through his body and dragged ragged tentacles across his brain. He moaned.
A voice spoke hollowly in the distance. "He's waking. Call his wife."
Alan opened his eyes in a white room; a white light hung over his head. Beside him, looking down with a rueful smile, stood a young man wearing space medical insignia. "Yes," he acknowledged the question in Alan's eyes, "you hit the switch. That was three days ago. When you're up again we'd all like to thank you."
Suddenly a sobbing-laughing green-eyed girl was pressed tightly against him. Neither of them spoke. They couldn't. There was too much to say.
THE END
MINOR DETAIL
By JACK SHARKEY
The Secretary of Defense, flown in by special plane from the new Capitol Building in Denver, trotted down the ramp with his right hand outstretched before him.
At the base of the ramp his hand was touched, clutched and hidden by the right hand of General "Smiley" Webb in a hearty parody of a casual handshake. General Webb did everything in a big way, and that included even little things like handshakes.
Retrieving his hand once more, James Whitlow, the Secretary of Defense, smiled nervously with his tiny mouth, and said,
"Well, here I am."
This statement was taken down by a hovering circle of news reporters, dispatched by wireless and telephone to every town in the forty-nine states, expanded, contracted, quoted and misquoted, ignored and misconstrued, and then forgotten; all this in a matter of hours.
The nation, hearing it, put aside its wonted trepidations, took an extra tranquilizer or two, and felt secure once more. The government was in good hands.
* * * * *
Leaving the reporters in a disgruntled group beyond the cyclone-fence-and-barbed-wire barriers surrounding Project W, General Webb, seated beside Whitlow in the back of his private car, sighed and folded his arms.
"You'll be amazed!" he chortled, nudging his companion with a bony elbow.
"I--I expect so," said Whitlow, clinging to his brief case with both hands. It contained, among other things, a volume of mystery stories and a ham sandwich, neatly packaged in aluminum foil. Whitlow didn't want to chance losing it. Not, at least, until he'd eaten the sandwich.
"Of course, you're wondering where I got the idea for my project," said "Smiley" Webb, adding, for the benefit of his driver, "Keep your eyes on the road, Sergeant! The WAC barracks will still be there when you get off duty!"
"Yes, sir," came a hollow grunt from the front seat.
"Weren't you?" asked General Webb, gleaming a toothy smile in Whitlow's direction.
"Weren't I what?" Whitlow asked miserably, having lost the thread of their conversation due to a surreptitious glance backward at the WAC barracks in their wake.
"Wondering about the project!" snapped the general.
"Yes. We all were," said the Secretary of Defense, appending somewhat tartly, "That's why they sent me here."
"To be sure. To be sure," General Webb muttered. He didn't much like tartness in responses, but the Secretary of Defense, unfortunately, was hardly a subordinate, and therefore not subject to the general's choler. Silly little ass! he said to himself. Rather liking the sound of the words--albeit in his mind--he repeated them over again, adding embellishments like "pompous" and "mousy" and "squirrel-eyed." After three or four such thoughts, the general felt much better.
"I thought the whole thing up, myself," he said, proudly.
"I wish you'd stop being so ambiguous," Whitlow protested in a small voice. "Just what is this project? How does it work? Will it help us win the war?"
"Sssh!" said the general, jerking a quivering forefinger perpendicular before pursed lips. "Security!"
He closed one eye in a broad wink and wriggled a thumb in the direction of the driver. "He's only cleared for Confidential material," said the general, his tone casting aspersions on the sergeant's patriotism, ancestry and personal hygiene. "This project is, of course, Top Secret!" He said the words reverently, his face going all noble and brave. Whitlow half-expected him to remove his hat, but he did not.
* * * * *
They drove onward, then, in silence, until they passed by a large field, in the center of which Whitlow could discern the outlines of an immense bull's-eye, in front of a tall, somewhat rickety khaki-colored reviewing stand, draped in tired bunting.
"What's that?" asked Whitlow, relinquishing his grip on his brief case long enough to point toward the field.
"Ssssh!" said "Smiley" Webb. "You'll find out in a matter of hours."
"Many hours?" Whitlow asked, thinking of the ham sandwich.
General Webb consulted a magnificent platinum timepiece anchored to his thick hairy wrist by a stout leather strap.
"In exactly one hour, thirty-seven minutes, and forty-three-point-oh-oh-nine seconds!" he said, proudly.
"Thank you," Whitlow sighed. "You're certainly running this thing--whatever it is--in an efficient manner."
"Thank you!" General Webb glowed. "We like to think so," he added modestly.
* * * * *
Passwords, signs, countersigns, combination-locks and electronic recognition signals were negotiated one by one, until Whitlow was despairing of ever getting into the heart of Project W. He said as much to General Webb, who merely flashed the grin which gave him his nickname, and opened a final door.
For a moment, Whitlow thought he was going deaf. The shrill roar of screeching metal and throbbing dynamos that pounded at his eardrums began to fuddle his mind, until General Webb handed him a small cardboard box--also stamped, like every door and wall in the place, "Top Secret"--in which his trembling fingers located two ordinary rubber earplugs, which he instantly put to good use.
"There she is!" said General Webb, proudly, gesturing over the railing of the small balcony upon which they stood. "The Whirligig!"
"What?" called Secretary of Defense Whitlow, shaking his head to indicate he hadn't heard a word.
Somewhat piqued, but resigned, General Webb leaned his wide mouth nearly up against Whitlow's small pink plugged ear, and roared the same information at the top of his lungs.
Whitlow, a little stunned by the volume despite the plugs, nodded wearily, to indicate that he'd heard, then asked, in a high, piping voice, "What's it for?"
Webb's eyes bulged in their sockets. "Great heavens, man, can't you see?" He gestured down at his creation, his baby, his project, as though it were self-evident what its function was.
Whitlow strained his eyes to divine anything that might give a clue as to just what the government had been pouring money into for the past eight months. All he saw was what appeared to be a sort of ferris-wheel, except that it was revolving in a horizontal plane. The structure was completely enclosed in metal, and was whirling too fast for even the central shaft to be anything but a hazy, silver-blue blur.
"I see it," he shouted, squeakily. "But I don't understand it!"
"Come with me," said General Webb, re-opening the door at their backs. He was just about to step through when, with a quick blush of mortification, he remembered the "Top Secret" earplugs. Hastily, averting his face lest the other man see his embarrassment, he returned his plugs to their box, and did the same with Whitlow's.
Whitlow was glad when the door closed behind them.
"My office is this way," said Webb, striding off in a stiff military manner.
Whitlow, with a forlorn shrug, could do nothing but clutch his brief case and follow.
* * * * *
"It's this way," General Webb began, once they were seated uncomfortably in his office. From a pocket in his khaki jacket, Webb had produced a big-bowled calabash pipe, and was puffing its noxious gray fumes in all directions while he spoke. "Up until the late fifties, war was a simple thing ..."
Oh, not the March of Science Speech! said Whitlow to himself. He knew it by heart. It was the talk of the Capitol, and the nightmare of military strategists. As the general's voice droned on and on, Whitlow barely listened. The general, Top Secret or no Top Secret, was divulging nothing that wasn't common knowledge from the ruins of Philadelphia to the great Hollywood crater ...
All at once, weapons had gotten too good. That was the whole problem. Wars, no matter what the abilities of the death-dealing guns, cannon, rifles, rockets or whatever, needed one thing on the battlefield that could not be turned out in a factory: Men.
In order to win a war, a country must be vanquished. In order to vanquish a country, soldiers must be landed. And that was precisely wherein the difficulty lay: landing the soldiers.
Ships were nearly obsolete in this respect. Landing barges could be blown out of the water as fast as they were let down into it.
Paratroops were likewise hopeless. The slow-moving troop-carrying planes daren't even peek above the enemy's horizon without chancing an onslaught of "thinking" rockets that would stay on their trail until they were molten cinders falling into the sea.
So someone invented the supersonic carrier. This was pretty good, allowing the planes to come in high and fast over the enemy's territory, as fast as the land-to-air missiles themselves. The only drawback was that the first men to try parachuting at that speed were battered to confetti by the slipstream of their own carriers. That would not do.
Next, someone thought of the capsules. Each man was packed into a break-proof, shock-proof, water-proof, wind-proof plastic capsule, and ejected safely beyond the slipstream area of the carriers, at which point, each capsule sprouted a silken chute that lowered the enclosed men gently down into range of the enemy's rocket-fire ...
This plan was scrapped like the others.
And so, things were at a stalemate. There hadn't been a really good skirmish for nearly five years. War was hardly anything but a memory, what with both sides practically omnipotent. Unless troops could be landed, war was downright impossible. And, no one could land troops, so there was no war.
As a matter of fact, Whitlow liked the state of affairs. To be Secretary of Defense during a years-long peace was a soft job to top all soft jobs. And Whitlow didn't much like war. He'd rather live peacefully with his mystery stories and ham sandwiches.
But the Capitol, under the relentless lobbying of the munitions interests, was trying to find a way to get a war started.
They had tried simply bombing the other countries, but it hadn't worked out too well: the other countries had bombed back.
This plan had been scrapped as too dangerous.
And then, just when all seemed lost, when it looked as though mankind was doomed to eternal peace ...
Along came General "Smiley" Webb.
"Land troops?" he'd said, confidently, "nothing easier. With the government's cooperation, I can have our troops in any country in the world, safely landed, within the space of one year!"
Congress had voted him the money unanimously, and off he'd gone to work at Project W. No one knew quite what it was about, but the general had seemed so self-assured that-- Well, they'd almost forgotten about him until some ambitious clerk, trying to balance at least part of the budget, had discovered a monthly expenditure to an obscure base in the southwest totalling some millions of dollars. Perfunctory checking had brought out the fact that "Smiley" Webb had been drawing this money every month, and hadn't as much as mailed in a single progress report.
There'd been swift phone-calls from Denver to Project W, and, General Webb informed them, not only was all the money to be accounted for, but so was all the time and effort: the project was completed, and about to be tested. Would someone like to come down and watch?
Someone would.
* * * * *
And thus it was that James Whitlow, with mystery stories and ham sandwich, had taken the first plane from the Capitol ...
"... when all at once, I thought: Speed! Endurance! That is the problem!" said Webb, breaking in on Whitlow's reverie.
"I beg your pardon?" said the Secretary of Defense.
Webb whacked the dottle out of his pipe into a meaty palm, tossed the smoking cinders rather carelessly into a waste-basket, and leaned forward to confront the other man face to face, their noses almost nudging.
"Why are parachutes out?" he snapped.
"They go too slow," said Whitlow.
"Why do we use parachutes at all?"
"To keep the men from getting killed by the fall."
"Why does a fall kill the men?"
"It-- It breaks their bones and stuff."
"Bah!" Webb scoffed.
"Bah?" reiterated Whitlow. "Bah?"
"Certainly bah!" said the general. "All it takes is a little training."
* * * * *
"All what takes?" said Whitlow, helplessly.
"Falling, man, falling!" the general boomed. "If a man can fall safely from ten feet-- Why not from ten times ten feet!?"
"Because," said Whitlow, "increasing height accelerates the rate of falling, and--"
"Poppycock!" the general roared.
"Yes, sir," said Whitlow, somewhat cowed.
"Muscle-building. That's the secret. Endurance. Stress. Strain. Tension."
"If-- If you say so ..." said Whitlow, slumping lower and lower in his chair as the general's massive form leaned precariously over him. "But--"
"Of course you are puzzled," said the general, suddenly chummy. "Anyone would be. Until they realized the use to which I've put the Whirligig!"
"Yes. Yes, I suppose so ..." said Whitlow, thinking longingly of his ham sandwich, and its crunchy, moist green smear of pickle relish.
"The first day--" said General Webb, "it revolved at one gravity! They withstood it!"
"What did? Who withstood? When?" asked Whitlow, with much confusion.
"The men!" said the general, irritably. "The men in the Whirligig!"
Whitlow jerked bolt upright. "There are men in that thing?" It's not possible, he thought.
"Of course," said Webb, soothingly. "But they're all right. They've been in there for thirty days, whirling around at one gravity more each day. We have constant telephone communication with them. They're all feeling fine, just fine."
"But--" Whitlow said, weakly.
General Webb had him firmly by the arm, and was leading him out of the office. "We must get to the stands, man. Operation Human Bomb in ten minutes."
"Bomb?" Whitlow squeaked, scurrying alongside Webb as the larger man strode down the echoing corridor.
"A euphemism, of course," said Webb. "Because they will fall much like a bomb does. But they will not explode! No, they will land, rifles in hand, ready to take over the enemy territory."
"Without parachutes?" Whitlow marveled.
"Exactly," said the general, leading the way out into the blinding desert sunlight. "You see," he remarked, as they strolled toward the heat-shimmering outlines of the reviewing stand, its bunting hanging limp and faded in the dry, breezeless air, "it's really so simple I'm astonished the enemy didn't think of it first. Though, of course, I'm glad they didn't-- Ha! ha!" He oozed self-appreciation.
"Ha ha," repeated Whitlow, with little enthusiasm.
"When one is whirled at one gravity, you see, the wall--the outside rim--of the Whirligig, becomes the floor for the men inside. Each day, they have spent up to ten hours doing nothing but deep knee-bends, and eating high protein foods. Their legs will be able to withstand any force of landing. If they can do deep knee-bends at thirty gravities--during which, of course, each of them weighed nearly three tons--they can jump from any height and survive. Good, huh?"
* * * * *
Whitlow was worried as they clambered up into the stands. There seemed to be no one about but the two of them.
"Who else is coming?" he asked.
"Just us," said Webb. "I'm the only one with a clearance high enough to watch this. You're only here because you're my guest."
"But--" said Whitlow, observing the heat-baked wide-open spaces extending on all sides of the reviewing stand and bull's-eye, "the men on this base can surely watch from almost anywhere not beyond the horizon."
"They'd better not!" was the general's only comment.
"Well," said Whitlow, "what happens now?"
"The men that were in that Whirligig have--since you and I went to my office to chat--been transported to the airfield, from which point they were taken aloft--" he consulted his watch, "five minutes, and fifty-five-point-six seconds ago."
"And?" asked Whitlow, casually unbuckling the straps of his brief case and slipping out his sandwich.
"The plane will be within bomb vector of this target in just ten seconds!" said Webb, confidently.
Whitlow listened, for the next nine seconds, then, right on schedule, he heard the muted droning of a plane, high up. Webb joggled him with an elbow. "They'll fall faster than any known enemy weapon can track them," he said, smugly.
"That's fortunate," said Whitlow, munching desultorily at his sandwich. "Bud dere's wud thig budduhs bee."
"Hmmf?" asked the general.
Whitlow swallowed hastily. "I say, there's one thing bothers me."
"What's that?" asked the general.
"Well, it's just that gravity is centripetal, you know, and the Whirligig is centrifugal. I wondered if it might not make some sort of difference?"
"Bah!" said General Webb. "Just a minor detail."
"If you say so," Whitlow shrugged.
"There they come!" shouted the general, jumping to his feet.
Whitlow, despite his misgivings, found that he, too, was on his feet, staring skyward at the tiny dots that were detaching themselves from the shining bulk of the carrier plane. As he watched, his heart beating madly, the dots grew bigger, and soon, awfully soon, they could be distinguished as man-shaped, too.
"There's-- There's something wrong!" said the general. "What's that they're all shouting? It should be 'Geronimo' ..."
Whitlow listened. "It sounds more like 'Eeeeeyaaaaa'," he said.
And it was.
The sound grew from a distant mumble to a shrieking roar, and the next thing, each man had landed upon the concrete-and-paint bull's-eye before the reviewing stand.
Whitlow sighed and re-buckled his brief case.
The general moaned and fainted.
And the men of the Whirligig, all of whom had landed on the target head-first, did nothing, their magnificently muscled legs waving idly in a sudden gentle gust of desert breeze.
THE END
RESURRECTION
by ROBERT J. SHEA
They had been cramped for space, him and his people. Obviously this new age had solved the problem better.
"You're a fascinating person," the girl said. "I've never met anyone like you before. Tell me your story again."
The man was short and stocky, with Asiatic features and a long, stringy mustache. "The whole story?" he asked. "It would take a lifetime to tell you." He stared out the window at the yellow sun and the red sun. He still hadn't gotten used to seeing two suns. But that was minor, really, when there were so many other things he had to get used to.
A robot waiter, with long thin metal tubes for arms and legs, glided over. When he'd first seen one of those, he'd thought it was a demon. He'd tried to smash it. They'd had trouble with him at first.
"They had trouble with me at first," he said.
"I can imagine," said the girl. "How did they explain it to you?"
"It was hard. They had to give me the whole history of medicine. It was years before I got over the notion that I was up in the Everlasting Blue Sky, or under the earth, or something." He grinned at the girl. She was the first person he'd met since they got him a job and gave him a home in a world uncountable light years from the one he'd been born on.
"When did you begin to understand?"
"They simply taught all of history to me. Including the part about myself. Then I began to get the picture. Funny. I wound up teaching them a lot of history."
"I bet you know a lot."
"I do," the man with the Asiatic features said modestly. "Anyway, they finally got across to me that in the 22nd century--they had explained the calendar to me, too; I used a different one in my day--they had learned how to grow new limbs on people who had lost arms and legs."
"That was the first real step," said the girl.
"It was a long time till they got to the second step," he said. "They learned how to stimulate life and new growth in people who had already died."
"The next part is the thing I don't understand," the girl said.
"Well," said the man, "as I get it, they found that any piece of matter that has been part of an organism, retains a physical 'memory' of the entire structure of the organism of which it was part. And that they could reconstruct that structure from a part of a person, if that was all there was left of him. From there it was just a matter of pushing the process back through time. They had to teach me a whole new language to explain that one."
"Isn't it wonderful that intergalactic travel gives us room to expand?" said the girl. "I mean now that every human being that ever lived has been brought back to life and will live forever?"
"Same problem I had, me and my people," said the man. "We were cramped for space. This age has solved it a lot better than I did. But they had to give me a whole psychological overhauling before I understood that."
"Tell me about your past life," said the girl, staring dreamily at him.
"Well, six thousand years ago, I was born in the Gobi Desert, on Earth," said Genghis Khan, sipping his drink.