Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  MARDER remembered something Lowndes had said. “Do the snakes live in caves?”

  “No!” Hulman said distastefully. “That’s what fooled me. It was a village of stake houses set into the head of a little lake, almost like the one here. I set down on the lake, coasted up to the village, climbed up a ladder, and saw them!”

  He shuddered. “They just stood there, very quietly, watching me from the doors and windows.

  What made it worse somehow was that they wore clothes—but the clothes didn’t cover enough. Those weaving, soft, blue bodies and staring eyes! I backed off down the ladder, with my gun ready, in case they rushed me; but they never moved . . .”

  He had found eight more colonies of the snakes farther down the valley, but no trace of another tribe of his beautiful humanoids. He flew up the valley then, high up into the mountains, almost exhausting his fuel; and beside a glacier-fed mountain lake was a tiny stake village, built into the water. And they were snakes again.

  “At the time, I didn’t know just what to make of it. There was the possibility that my village represented an advance troop of human beings into a land of snakes. But I suspected—I felt—even then, that it was the other way around; that it was the snakes that were encroaching on the humans. So I swore to myself that as long as I lived, at least, human beings were going to hold this section of the valley undisturbed and in safety.

  “When I came back, I said to Celia—she was standing at the same spot I’d seen her last, as if she’d never left it—‘Celia, I must speak to your people. Go tell them I will come again tomorrow and that they must not run away.’ She looked at me silently for a long time, and then she turned and left in the direction of the village. She came back late at night and crept into my arms and said, ‘They have promised to wait for you.’

  “I set out next morning, full of great plans. The snakes lived in widely scattered settlements, after all. The villagers and I could wipe out those settlements one by one, until we’d cleared the land about us! That was the natural solution, wasn’t it? I didn’t realize then how different, in some ways, Celia’s people were from us!”

  BOYCE asked uneasily, “What happened?”

  “What happened?” Hulman repeated. “Well, I came over that rise, and there the village was. This time I knew they’d stayed at home! Then, not twenty feet off my path, I saw two of the snakes standing in the bushes, one watching me, the other looking at the village. Each had a kind of chunky crossbow across his shoulders; and they couldn’t be seen from the village . . .”

  He paused and shook his head. “So I shot them both down, before they got over their surprise. That was all.” He looked from one to the other again. “It was the natural thing to do, wasn’t it?”

  Boyce nodded uncertainly. Marder said nothing.

  Hulman leaned forward. “But apparently, from the point of view of the villagers, it wasn’t! Because when I was done with the snakes—one of them took three shots before it would lie still—the village was empty again. When I got back home, I was actually sick with disappointment. And then I discovered that Celia was gone!

  “That was a bad three days. But she came back then. And on the morning she came back, I discovered they’d broken up the village overnight and moved on. I think they’re not more than ten or twenty miles distant from here, but I never tried to look them up again.”

  Boyce said puzzled, “But I don’t see—”

  “Neither did I,” Hulman interrupted, “until it was too late!” He gave his short bark of laughter again; there was, Marder realized, a sort of suppressed fury in it. “They won’t kill their enemies—they’re too polite for that! So their enemies are gradually squeezing them out of existence.” The three men studied each other in silence for a moment. Then Marder asked slowly, “Captain Hulman, what do you expect us to do in this situation?”

  “Kill the snakes!” Hulman said promptly. “As many as we can find! If the human beings of this world won’t defend themselves, we’ll have to defend them. As long as I’ve been here, no party of snakes has come past this point of the valley. A few of them have tried!” His eyes glittered with open hatred. “But I can’t be on guard here forever. It’s up to you and the other men on the ship to do the job right!”

  THOUGH Boyce was sleeping uneasily, Marder hadn’t yet shut his eyes. The uneasiness was in him, too; and in him it was strong enough to offset the fatigue and excitement of the day. Vague night sounds came into the room they shared, a plaintive, thin calling like the distant cry of a bird. Not too different from the sounds on many other worlds he had known, and, as on all worlds that were new and strange, faintly tinged with the menace that was largely in the imagination.

  But it was Hulman himself who was the principal cause of Marder’s uneasiness.

  The face of the old explorer, the rumbling, angry voice, his monomaniacal devotion to the strange humanoids kept recurring in his mind. Nothing Hulman had done previously to stimulate the imagination of Earthmen toward the laborious exploration of space could equal this final accidental achievement: to have encountered the first other human beings Earthmen had yet discovered in the Universe. Men had looked out from their world like children staring into a great, dark forbidding room. They had found space to be peopled sparsely with intelligent life—life that was sometimes horrible, sometimes merely odd, sometimes beautiful in weird, incomprehensible ways. But never enough like Man to be acceptable!

  Hulman’s fierce insistence on protecting what seemed to be the dying remnants of a human race against its own wishes was something Marder could understand well enough. He did not doubt that Boyce and the others would respond wholeheartedly to that insistence. Here was the proof that human life could rise spontaneously and endlessly throughout all the galaxies, that the Universe was not a darkened room, after all, but one lighted forever by the fires of humanity.

  They had to protect that proof . . .

  Strangely enough, though Boyce was asleep and he awake, it was Boyce who first seemed aware of motion in the house. Marder heard him breathe and stir unquietly, and then come awake and grow still, listening, waiting. He smiled faintly at the familiar signs, the tense alertness, the silent questioning of the strange world about them: “What is it? Who moves?” On many other strange, dark worlds, he had been among Earthmen as they came awake, asking that question. And he with them . . .”

  He grew aware of it then: there was motion in the house now, beyond the walls. Gradually, it resolved itself into slow, heavy steps on the carpeted flooring; and the picture of Hulman leaving his room to peer down the stairs came so convincingly into his mind that at once he relaxed again. And he was aware that Boyce was relaxing too.

  Neither of them spoke. After a time, Hulman went back to his room, walking carefully so as not to disturb his guests; and the house was still. Presently, Boyce was sleeping again. Marder tried to pick up the train of thoughts he had been following before the disturbance; but they eluded him now. Fatigue grew up in him like waves of mental darkness, smothering the remnants of uneasiness; and reluctantly he let himself drift off.

  The blast that roused him seemed to have gone off almost beside his head.

  HE found himself standing in the center of the room, gun in one hand, fiashbeam in the other. Boyce’s wide back was just disappearing through the door into the dark hall beyond; and Boyce’s shout was in his ears;

  “Hulman! They’ve got Hulman!”

  Marder halted a fraction of a second, checked by the ridiculous hesitation of a man who doesn’t want to go out into a strange house undressed; then he was following Boyce. As he plunged down the broad staircase to the lower floor of Hulman’s house, a memory flashed into his mind: the guns that Hulman, cut off from standard power sources, had manufactured for himself here and shown them earlier in the evening. It had been the report of a missile gun that had awakened him; one of Hulman’s own.

  He lost Boyce’s light for a moment when he reached the lower floor, and stood in indecision until he heard
a muffled shouting to his left, and remembered the descent into the cellars. As he reached the door, there was another angry shout from Boyce, and a blaze of pink light from below. Boyce had cut loose with his gun, so he was in contact with the intruders; and things would have to be finished very quickly now—a thermion spray was not designed to be an indoor weapon!

  Marder reached the bottom of the cellar stairs seconds later.

  A hedge of flame to their right, steady, impenetrable and soundless, slanted from the wall half around the great well. It cut them off from further advance; presumably it had cornered their antagonists.

  Boyce, dressed in nightshorts, turned a furiously contorted face to him.

  “One of them ducked around the corner over there! It can’t get out. It was carrying Hulman!”

  “Where is Hulman?”

  “Over there—dead!”

  MARDER squinted against the reflected glare of the fire. Something dark lay hunched against the wall beyond the well; that was all he could make out.

  “Sure he’s dead?” His voice carefully matter-of-fact.

  “Of course!” Boyce said beside him. The hand that held the gun was shaking. “When it dropped him—when I snapped a bolt at it—I saw he’d been shot through the head with his own gun!”

  “The natives?” Marder asked, still carefully.

  “No. Something—those snakes he was afraid of—some animal. It whipped around the corner before I saw it very clearly—” His voice had gone dull. Marder glanced at him quickly. Boyce was in a state of semi-shock, and they had only a few minutes before the fire ate far enough into the walls to threaten their retreat upstairs and out of the house. He had no personal qualms about leaving Hulman’s body and Hulman’s slayers to roast together—the coincidence of murder on that particular night was something one could figure out more conveniently later—but Boyce might present a problem.

  A voice addressed them from out of a passage beyond the well.

  “You who were his friends,” it said, “will you listen to me?” Marder felt his scalp crawling. “Who are you?” he called back. “He called me his wife.”

  Boyce started violently, but Marder waved him to silence. It was a rich, feminine voice, a trifle plaintive; it was not difficult to fit it mentally to the painting of Hulman’s wife.

  “Why did you kill him?”

  There was a pause.

  “But I thought you understood,” the voice said. “Your medical men would say that he had been insane for twenty years, as he counted time. They would have forced him back into sanity. I could not bear the thought that he should suffer that.”

  Marder swallowed hard. “Suffer what?”

  “Are you all fools? He was a fool, though I loved him. He could not see behind the shape of things. So—here among us—he saw shapes he could bear to see.

  In those moments when sanity came to him and he really saw what was there—then he killed. Are you all like that?”

  BOYCE stared at Marder, his mouth working. “What is she talking about?” he whispered hoarsely. “Is the snake with her?”

  “Go upstairs, Boyce! Wait for me outside!”

  “Are you going to kill the snake?”

  “Yes, I’ll kill the snake.” Boyce disappeared up the stairs. “The house is burning, but there is some time left,” Marder told the voice then. “Is there any way you can save yourself?”

  “I can leave by the river that flows under the well,” the voice said, “if you do not shoot at me.”

  “I won’t shoot at you.”

  “May I take his body?” Marder hesitated. “Yes.”

  “And you will all leave with your ship? I loved him, though my people thought it strange almost beyond their tolerance. They are foolish, too, yet not as foolish as you are. They saw what was in his mind and not beyond that, and so they were afraid of him. But he is dead now and there is nothing that your people and mine could share. We are too different. Will you leave?” Marder moistened his lips. “We’ll leave,” he said, seeing it all now, and glad he had sent Boyce upstairs. “What did you see beyond what was in his mind?”

  “A brave spirit, though very frightened,” the voice said slowly. “He ventured far and far and far into the dark of which he was afraid. I loved him for that!” It paused. “I am coming now,” it added, “and I think you had better look away.”

  Marder did not intend to look away, but at the last moment, when there was movement at the comer of the passage, he did. He saw only a swift undulating shadow pass along the wall, pause and stoop quickly, rise again with a bulky burden clasped to it, glide on and vanish.

  He stood staring at the blank wall until there was a faint splash in the well far below him.

  THE great ship was drifting slowly above the night side of the world it was leaving, when Commander Lowndes joined Marder at the observation port.

  “Boyce will make out all right,” he said moodily. “He only guessed part of the truth, and that bit is being taken from his mind.” He studied Marder thoughtfully. “If you’d looked squarely at the thing, we might have had to give you the same treatment. Our pickled specimens are pretty damned hideous.” Marder shrugged. Lowndes sat on the edge of a table.

  “Selective hysterical blindness maintained for twenty-two years—with his own type of artistic hallucinations thrown in! I can’t help wishing it hadn’t happened to Hulman.”

  “He didn’t maintain it throughout,” Marder said slowly. “And whenever he saw them clearly, he killed them . . .”

  “Who wouldn’t? I almost feel,” Lowndes said, “like getting out of space and staying out, for good!”

  Which was giving it the ultimate in emphasis.

  “What are you reporting?” Marder asked.

  “That Hulman died here, quite peacefully, about a year before we found him—leaving a diary of inspiring courage and devotion to space exploration behind him. We’ll have time enough to work up the diary. That should keep everybody happy. Marder,” he said suddenly, waving his hand at the observation port, “do you think there actually are—well, people out there. Somewhere?”

  Marder looked out at the vast, star-studded, shining black immensity.

  “I hope so,” he said.

  “Do you think we’ll ever find them?”

  “I don’t know,” Marder said thoughtfully. “They’ve never found us.”

  THE VAMPIRATE

  IT WAS AN added bitterness to Lane Rawlings to discover that in the face of sudden disaster the Nachief of Frome could react with the same unshakable, almost contemptuous, self-confidence which he showed toward her and his other human slaves. That the lonely station of the Terrestrial Bureau of Agriculture and the nameless world far below them was both alert and heavily armed enough to ward off the attack of a spaceship should have come as a stunning surprise to him-and Lane would have exchanged her own very slim chances of survival at that point for the satisfaction of seeing the Nachief show fear.

  Instead, he did instantly what had to be done to avoid the immediacy of complete defeat.

  Lane’s mind did not attempt to keep up with Nachief’s actions. The ship was still rocking from the first blow of the unseen guns beneath, when she, Grant, and Sean were being flung into the central escape bubble. When a lock snapped shut behind them and the bubble lit up inside, she saw that the Nachief had fob lowed them, in and was crouched over the controls. Tenths of a second later came another explosion, triggered by the Nachief himself—an explosion that simultaneously ripped out the side of the ship and flung the bubble free . . .

  LANE FOUND herself staring out of the bubble’s telescopic ports at the sunlit, green and brown strip of land toward which they were falling. It was framed on two sides by a great blue sweep of sea. Behind them, to the left, was the glassy dome of the station, twin trails of white smoke marking the mile-long parallel scars the ship’s guns had cut into the soil in the instant of the Nachief’s savage, wanton attack. The trails stopped just short of the dome. Whoever was down there als
o had reacted in the nick of time!

  The scene tilted violently outside, and Lane went sprawling back on the forms of Sean and Grant. The two colonists gave no indication even of being conscious; they had sat about like terrorized children for the past several days; they lay there now like stunned animals. Regaining her balance, Lane realized the bubble was falling much too fast, and for an instant she had the fierce hope that it was out of control.

  Then she understood: he wants to get us down near that station—near a food supply! A wave of sick, helpless fury washed over her.

  The Nachief looked around, grinning briefly, almost as if he had caught the thought.

  “Pot-shooting at us. Lane! Don’t worry—we’ll make it!”

  The deep voice; the friendly, authoritative, easily amused voice she’d been in love with for over a year! The voice that had told her, quite casually, less than thirty-six hours ago, that she and Sean and Grant would have to die, because she had found out something she wasn’t supposed to know—and because she had made the additional, mistake of telling the other two! The voice had gone on as casually to describe the grotesque indecency of the kind of death the Nachief was planning for them—

  She stared at the back of his massive blond head, weak with her terror and hatred, until the bubble lurched violently again, flinging her back. This time, when she scrambled up on hands and knees, they were dropping with a headlong, rushing finality that told her the bubble had been hit and was going to crash. Rut they were still, a mile above ground.

  She offered no resistance when the Nachief picked her up and hauled her out of the lock with him.

  RIBBON-CHUTES were unfolding in a coordinated pattern of minor jolts above them. Though it was only the Nachief’s arm that held her damped hard against his side, Lane felt quite insanely calm! They had dropped below the point where the station’s gunners could target on them; he was going to get her down alive; he had no intention of giving up his prey merely because his own life was in danger! Something struck against her legs—the barrel of the big hunting gun he held in his other hand. A sudden cunning thought came to her, and she went completely limp, waiting.