by Jerry
Jarvis grinned. He basked in his new importance. He strode confidently to the machine and leaned over so that he was peering closely into the faceplate. A few of the councilmen followed to looked cautiously over his shoulder.
It was some time before Jarvis realized that the creature’s eyes were open and that he was staring out at them—and not quite seeing them. Something unseen seemed to have passed between them.
Jarvis jerked back in surprise. The councilmen quickly got out of the way. They looked disconcerted.
“He is awake,” Jarvis reported. “But he does not seem to see us.”
The mayor stepped forward and corroborated Jarvis’ observation. And as he looked down and deeply into the pale, blank eyes of the spaceman he felt an unpleasant chill shake his body. He remained hunched forward and staring for some time, then stood aside and motioned his fellow Councilmen to step forward so that they might each, in turn, look with reverence upon the unfortunate creature. If the spaceman was conscious of this solemn parade of faces in front of him then he made no move to acknowledge what he saw.
We must work quickly, Dunstable realized, or it may be too late to help him . . .
He summoned one of the nearby villagers—an adventurous lad of early years—and sent him back to the village for the town physician and blacksmith. The blacksmith was to bring his strongest and most reliable tools and the physician to arrange for a pallet to be brought, so that the spaceman might be gently transported to a place of seclusion and rest—if he could be rescued from the gigantic spacesuit that could soon become a coffin.
While he waited anxiously he supervised the curious villagers into a long, slow-moving column that filed cautiously past the gigantic metal head and looked furtively in through the dusty faceplate at the pale, unsmiling face of the spaceman.
MATTARO was conscious—in a vague sort of half-life—of the strange faces peering down at him. They were like dreadful figures in a dream; the faces all screwed up with time, skins scorched a dark, unpleasant color by the naked radiation of their sun—he could not find it in him to accept them as human beings.
Mother, my mind is on fire . . . His body was covered by a dense film of sweat. Drops of it had formed above his eyes and splashed down, making it difficult for him to see. His breathing was shallow and irregular; his mouth was dry and his limbs burned with some strange internal fusion he could not understand.
Mother, am I dying?
His time was running out—had run out. He was breathing alien air—deadly, unfiltered—and it was having a terrifying effect upon his sterile metabolism. A hundred unseen bacteria had already invaded his bloodstream and each minute added more. In no time at all he would be reduced to a sick and festering hospital case—unless they, those people outside whom he loathed, somehow got him out of here and placed him in some sort of rigid quarantine and purged his weakened body of the microscopic invaders. But what standard of medicine could he expect from such people?
Probably little better than primitive herbalism, he thought, and wondered why his burning mind did not react more fearfully to this supposition. Perhaps he was rapidly losing the capacity to care.
Time passed and the strange faces no longer paraded past his faceplate. Only occasionally did one or two—with which he had become familiar—press forward, perhaps to monitor his rapid deterioration. Why don’t they do something?
Instead of just watching him and haunting him with their archaic incompetence.
Help me, his mind cried out. Cant you see I need help? I’m dying, don’t you see that? Cant you see that?
And for himself alone: Mother, am I really?
Had he survived his desertion and his incredible descent only to have what was left of him burned alive by these terrible alien bacteria? Was there no way for him to . . .
He could feel his mind slipping away, his conscious thoughts disintegrating; the possibility of logical, sequential thought became lost to him. His hands ceased their occasional fumbling with the dead controls and he slumped back into the fiery well that was his world. He closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep, surrounded by the fires and fury of a hell that had only previously existed in the unplumbed depths of his racial memory.
BLEEKER, the blacksmith, eyed the space suit doubtfully. “I haven’t any tools that can open that thing,” he announced. “Just take a close look at the metal. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What about the faceplate?” the mayor asked. He had become agitated; their time was running out. “Could we—”
“Not unless you want to mash him about and kill him. The stuff’s too tough to cut—or for a couple of taps to crack it open.”
“There’s some sort of opening around the back,” Jarvis said. “I’ve been looking real close and it seems to me that there’s some sort of hatchway there. It’s opened slightly.”
The blacksmith walked around to the other side of the suit and hunkered down in the dirt so that he could inspect the narrow opening the old man indicated. It was a narrow crack about three and a half feet long and it did indeed look like part of a hatchway. But the rest of it merged so smoothly with the gigantic carapace that it was difficult to gauge its shape.
“Well, what do you say?” Dunstable asked. “Can you lever that open?”
The blacksmith pursed his heavy lips and scowled. “Wouldn’t like to say. But I’ll give it a go.” He stood up, spat on his hands and rubbed them together. “Get as many strong lads as you can find—we’ll be needing them. If we take it in shifts then we just might budge it. But it’ll take strength if I’m to judge from the workmanship of this thing.”
The mayor leaned closer and, out of sight of the rest of the townspeople, breathed a confidence: “We have to get him out, you understand. Our air is dangerous to his lungs; it could very well kill him. And if we don’t get him to the physician in time—”
The blacksmith nodded. “Well, no use standing here. Let’s get, on with it . . .”
He walked back to where he had deposited an assortment of his tools on the bare ground. He selected a long crowbar and gestured to one of the young men who had assigned themselves to his direction. “I have several more of these in my barn. Go fetch them—as fast as you can. We’ll have need of them.”
The youth—and one other-hastened away.
Bleeker gripped the crowbar in his hands and moved back behind the gigantic space suit. He found the narrow aperture of the hatchway and worked the sharp point of the instrument an inch or so into the crevice. He leaned with all his weight upon the other end but the hatchway—if that was what it was—refused to budge.
“Some help here, lads,” he called out.
And they rushed forward to partake of this unaccustomed ritual.
MATTARO felt and heard the blows and curses and the hammering at his back, but he did not mind. Half in and half out of this grotesque world, with his mind on fire and his body weeping a rank, offensive fluid from every pore, he found time to dream in his fiery hell.
Through the flames he could see the great ships he had traveled with and the marvelous worlds his people had made for themselves between the stars, like delicate crystaline webs spun across the eternal night. His skin tingled with affectionate memory of the warmth beamed down by the tiny suns they had kindled to illuminate his world.
Mother, why hast thou forsaken me?
Accidentally. She did not know.
You should have known, Mother. Don’t you see? My mind is on fire. I’m burning up, one small cell at a time . . .
He saw his home world moving through space, felt the benign gravitation beneath his feet and basked in the emancipation of his people. He was space-born and had never known the feel of a planet underneath his feet or the burden of an unvarying gravity. His environment had been efficaciously controlled and he had never been exposed to the remorseless ravages of time and of the seasons that had made the faces of the colonists so gaunt and their lifetimes so short. And now he had fallen from this state of grac
e.
In his burning mind he saw his world turn and move toward him. Attendant suns flickered and died;
the dark heavens disappeared and his world shimmered and opaqued as it moved from one realm of space into another so that it might cross light-years in an instant. Mother, are you coming for me? Mother?
It was getting darker outside. Had the sky become dull as it prepared this world for dusk or had his eyesight betrayed him?
Mattaro was afraid.
IT TOOK them nearly two hours to open the stubborn hatchway. Two hours of sweating and cursing and sheer exhaustion. The blacksmith remained doggedly in command, seeing his youthful helpers come and go, applying their determined strength to the crowbars and then despairing—and each time moving the doorway a few millimeters more.
Finally it was wide enough for them to perceive the man inside and for them to reach in and grasp his shoulders. The spaceman did not stir: his mind—and his strength—seemed to have failed him.
They eased him from the protective webbing as gently as they could and carefully lowered him to a pallet.
The villagers stood back in awe. He seemed so pale and fragile without his fantastic carapace, like a chrysalis ripped before its time from its cocoon; but even then his body seemed to radiate a supernal quality that was quite overpowering.
Some fell to their knees and prayed. Women wept and small children hugged their mothers’ skirts and looked out upon the creature with one eye closed. A mornful chant went up from a group composed of older women; the dirge was caught up by the rest of the villagers and intoned with a deep sense of forboding.
The town physician bent over the wasted spaceman. He rolled back each eyelid in turn with his thumb and clucked disapprovingly. He rose, crossed himself and directed the two men he had assigned as carriers to hasten about their business.
“Take him to my surgery,” he directed. “Quickly.”
The two men trotted off. A path opened for them between the awestruck villagers. The mayor and his councilmen hurried after the litter as best as they could. The physician, a few years their junior, set a cracking pace they found difficult to emulate. Jarvis hurried after them, a look of deep concern on his wizened face.
After a short pause, during which the doleful chant fragmented and died, the villagers moved after the outré procession, like tufts of weed sucked into a vacuum left by a passing wind.
The blacksmith Carefully packed up his tools, then made his way slowly back to the township.
MATTARO was conscious of the journey by litter only as an even, jogging rhythm, occasionally broken. His mind had ceased to function in the external world. His body was on fire from head to toe and he was not responsible for the parade of images that danced through the brightlands of his fiery thoughts.
They placed him in the physician’s surgery, in a warm bed that had been quickly installed for the occasion. They closed and barred all the windows and lit a great fire in the hearth, hoping that these humble precautions would keep out the deadly bacteria and help to warm the spaceman’s cold body. But he was aware of none of these thoughtful ministrations.
The physician readied a sedative and poured a little of it into the spaceman’s mouth. The poor creature seemed to have lost the ability to move his lips and his tongue, so the remainder of the dense liquid spilled down onto the bedclothes. But enough found its way down his tortured throat to prove effective.
He quickly fell asleep. His breathing became more regular and his degree of perspiration slackened. A nightwatch was kept by his bedside and they hoped that his strange fever would abate. But when morning came they found him delirious and they were unable to reach him.
STRANGE dreams haunted Mattaro’s dying. He saw times and places and creatures he could never have imagined, let alone have remembered. But a part of him that had not yet been touched by the deadly fire did remember.
Sometimes he seemed to stand naked on a rock-strewn landscape while a savage wind drove a scouring rain against his bare, shivering flesh. Another time he huddled in a cave, his body wrapped in foul-smelling skins, and watched the flickering firelight in front of him weave eerie patterns on the walls—walls upon which were carved unimaginable things. And outside the hungry howls of carniverous animals savaged the night.
He saw suns from an angle he had never before known: high overhead in a sky of dazzling blue and ochre. He felt his feet sink into the rich, dark soil of a hundred different worlds. His dying mind became a riot of landscapes he had never seen, people he had never known and worlds he would never have thought possible. And still he did not understand.
He was pithecanthropus, homo sapiens, Jupiter and Zeus; Alexander and Plato, Aristophanes and Icarus; he was Christ and Mohammed, Freud and Jung, Columbus and Armstrong; Montgomery, Napoleon—and Hitler. He was everything and everybody who had ever lived.
There: in the bottommost ragbag of all, the racial memory that had slumbered untapped until the Pandora’s box of this world had opened and swallowed him up.
Now he remembered. In odd, distorted fragments, all that his people had ever been and ever hoped to be. It was all there, had always been there, but consciously inviolate until now. Until this dreadful dying had been visited upon him.
His own world seemed very far away, almost a superimposed memory—and nothing more. The fires had eaten most of it away; only a few tattered remnants clung to his disintegrated thoughts.
His would-be rescuers watched over him, bathed his body and did what they could to ease his pain. But there was a limit to what their primitive medicine could accomplish and even the reluctant physician finally had to admit that his survival was in the hands of the gods.
By which he meant the space people.
In the morning the sun rose and shone brightly through the open window at the foot of his bed. They saw no reason to maintain the useless facade of protection any longer and they thought he would appreciate the sunlight.
Something seemed to happen. He opened his eyes and looked out upon the wonder of this fresh young world and for the first time since they had rescued him a small measure of insanity and recognition crept into his eyes.
But his brain still burned and the pain was terminal. Something beautiful seemed to come across the sweeping grasslands and over the river and down toward the house where he had slumbered.
Something gigantic and hopeful, a great gull-winged world, dazzling in the light of its twin attendant suns. It grew until it filled his mind and blotted out the terrifying ancient landscapes.
For a moment he strugged and sat up, leaning heavily on one weak elbow. His other hand stretched out toward the open window and a wild, glazed look leaped into his eyes.
“Mother!” he cried.
But the shimmering, golden world turned suddenly away. The tiny suns winked out and the dazzling silhouette of his home presented her stern to him, like a ghostly galleon passing by a drifting, abandoned seaman. For perhaps several seconds he remained rigid in that posture, his eyes fastened upon some deep internal vision, and then he slumped back.
“Mother—” he whispered.
He closed his eyes and saw no more and several hours later he was dead.
THE funeral was held the following day. The whole town turned out for the occasion, each person bearing mind what he and she would relate to their children and their children’s children—how the town had witnessed the fall of a spaceman and attended his magnificent funeral.
They made his grave a short distance from the town, atop a small rise where the first rays of the morning sun would warm his cold ghost, and they declared it to be a holy place where pilgrims might draw spiritual sustenence. Every day thereafter two small children visited the grave and placed small floral tributes to the departed spaceman, and two small trees were planted so that they might be nourished by the holy soil; and the fruit they eventually bore was known as holy thereafter and was partaken of on the one day of the year when the town commemorated the fall of the spaceman.
; And so the spaceman vanished into legend. The two small trees took strong root and flourished over his grave and their fine silver branches grew and yearned towards the distant sky.
THE FRAYED STRING ON THE STRETCHED FOREFINGER OF TIME
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
Here is a story about the investigation of a murder before it is committed; the pre-killer and the victim are known, and the timing becomes all important Ergo, a “whendunit,” an ingenious blend of sf and detection from Mr. Biggle, whose most recent novel is THE WORLD MENDERS, Doubleday.
INSPECTOR-COMMANDER J. HARwell Graham sat at the center of his complex police web like a massive, bespectacled spider, alertly poised for frenzied action at the faintest electronic quiver—but Graham’s actions were mental, and he thought his prey into entangling cocoons fashioned of their own intended misdeeds. The inspector-commander was a brain that plugged itself into the world during duty hours, and then, because he found defiance of the law in all men, withdrew defeated.
He finished his afternoon dictation with an intimidating glance at the clock. The dictowriter spat the final memorandum onto his desk. Graham scrutinized it, signed his name, fed it back to the machine for copying and distribution.
“Ten minutes to tour’s end,” he informed the box. “Let’s see what Pre-Murder has picked up.”
“Ready to roll, sir,” his secretary answered immediately.
Graham thumbed a control, settled himself comfortably against yielding pneumatic contours, and watched the day’s accumulation of Pre-Murder information flash across the wall screen.
Newly appointed Assistant Inspector-Commander Roger Proller gaped at it. It was his second day on the job, and already he was stripped of illusions. The inspector-commander suspected that Higher Authority appointed assistants in the hope that one would prove capable of snatching his job. He treated them brutally and used up four a year, and for the wrong reason. Higher Authority considered the inspector-commander irreplaceable. The assistants were told frankly: Guard him, save his energy whenever possible, and preserve him from failure at all cost because failure could destroy him.