But Meek wasn’t watching Luke. His eyes were for the crowd and even as he pressed the firing button he saw a hand pick a bottle off the bar, lift it to throw. The gun in his right hand shrieked and the bottle smashed into a million pieces, the liquor turned to steam.
Slowly Meek backed away, his tread almost cat-like, his weak blue eyes like cold ice behind the thick lensed spectacles, his hunched shoulders still hunched, his lean jaw like a steel trap.
He felt the wall at his back and stopped.
Out in the room before him no one stirred. Luke stood like a statue, gripping his right hand, badly burned by the smoking gun that lay at his feet. Luke’s face was a mask of hatred.
The rest of them simply stared. Stared at this outlander. A man who wore clothing such as the Asteroid Belt had never seen before. A man who looked as if he might be a clerk or even a retired farmer out on a holiday. A man with glasses and hunched shoulders and a skin that had never known the touch of sun in space.
And yet a man who had given Luke Blaine a head start for his gun, had beaten him to the draw, had burned the gun out of his hand.
Oliver Meek heard himself speaking, but he couldn’t believe it was himself. It was as if some other person had taken command of his tongue, was forcing it to speak. He hardly recognized his voice, for it was hard and brittle and sounded far away.
It was saying: “Does anyone else want to argue with me?”
It was immediately apparent no one did.
II
Oliver Meek tried to explain it carefully, but it was hard when people were so insistent. Hard, too, to collect his thoughts so early in the day.
He sat on the edge of the bed, white hair tousled, his night shirt wrinkled, his bony legs sticking out beneath it.
“But I’m not a gun fighter,” he declared. “I’m just on a holiday. I never shot at a man before in all my life. I can’t imagine what came over me.”
The Rev. Harold Brown brushed his argument aside.
“Don’t you see, sir,” he insisted, “what you can do for us? These hoodlums will respect you. You can clean up the town for us. Blacky Hoffman and his mob run the place. They make decent government and decent living impossible. They levy protection tribute on every businessman, they rob and cheat the miners and prospectors who come here, they maintain vice conditions. …”
“All you have to do,” said Andrew Smith brightly, “is run Blacky and his gang out of town.”
“But,” protested Meek, “you don’t understand.”
“Five years ago,” the Rev. Brown went on, disregarding him, “I would have hesitated to pit force against force. It is not my way nor the way of the church … but for five years I’ve tried to bring the gospel to this place, have worked for better conditions and each year I see them steadily getting worse.”
“This could be a swell place,” enthused Smith, “if we could get rid of the undesirables. Fine opportunities. Capital would come in. Decent people could settle. We could have some civic improvements. Maybe a Rotary club.”
Meek wiggled his toes despairingly.
“You would earn the eternal gratitude of Asteroid City,” urged the Rev. Brown. “We’ve tried it before but it never worked.”
“They always killed our man,” Smith explained, “or he got scared, or they bought him off.”
“We never had a man like you before,” the Rev. Brown declared. “Luke Blaine is a notorious gunman. No one, ever before, has been able to beat him to …”
“There must be some mistake,” insisted Meek. “I’m just a bookkeeper. I don’t know a thing. …”
“We’d swear you in as marshal,” said Smith. “The office is vacant now. Has been for three months or more. We can’t find anyone to take it.”
“But I’m not staying long,” protested Meek. “I’m leaving pretty soon. I just want to try to get a look at the Asteroid Prowler and scout around to see if I can’t find some old rocks I read about once.”
The two visitors stared open mouthed at hm. Meek brightened. “You’ve heard about those old rocks, maybe. Some funny inscriptions on them. Fellow who found them thought they had been made recently, probably just before Earthmen first came here. But no one can read them. Maybe some other race … from somewhere far away.”
“But it won’t take you long,” pleaded Smith. “We got warrants for all of them. All you got to do is serve them.”
“Look,” said Meek in desperation, “you have got me wrong. It must have been an accident, shooting that gun out of Mr. Blaine’s hand.”
Meek felt dull anger stirring within him. What right did these people have of insisting that he help them with their troubles? What did they think he was? A desperado or space runner? Another gangster? Just because he’d been lucky at the Silver Moon.
“By gosh,” he declared flatly, “I just won’t do it!”
They looked pained, rose reluctantly.
“I suppose we shouldn’t have expected that you would,” said the Reverend Brown bitingly.
The Silver Moon was quiet. The bartender was languidly wiping the top of the bar. A Venusian boy was as languidly sweeping out. The dancing girls were gone, the music was silent.
Stiffy and Oliver Meek were among the few customers.
Stiffy gulped a drink and blew fiercely through his whiskers.
“Oliver,” he said, “you sure are a ring-tailed bearcat with them guns of yours. I wonder, would you tell me how you do it?”
“Look here, Mr. Grant,” said Meek. “I wish you’d quit talking about what I did. It was just an accident, anyhow. What I’m mainly interested in is this Asteroid Prowler you were telling me about. Is there any chance I might find him if I went out and looked?”
Stiffy choked, almost purple with astonishment.
“Good gravy,” he said, “now you want to go out and tangle with the Prowler!”
“Not tangle with him,” Meek declared. “Just look at him.”
“Mister,” Stiffy warned, “the best way to look at that thing is with a telescope. A good, powerful telescope.”
The swinging doors swung open and a man walked in.
The newcomer walked directly toward the table occupied by Stiffy and Meek. He halted beside it, black beard jutting fearsomely, eyes bleakly cold.
“I’m Blacky Hoffman,” he said. “I suppose you’re Meek.” He disregarded Stiffy.
Meek stood up and held out his hand.
“Glad to know you, Mr. Hoffman,” he said.
Blacky took the proffered hand in some surprise.
“Seems I should know you, Meek, but I don’t. Should have heard of you at some time or other. A man like you would get talked about.”
Meek shook his head. “I don’t think you ever have. I never did anything to get talked about.”
“Sit down,” said Hoffman and it sounded like a command.
“I got to be going,” Stiffy piped, already halfway to the door.
Hoffman poured out a drink and shoved the bottle at Meek. Meek gritted his teeth and poured a short one.
“No use beating around the bush,” said Blacky. “We may as well get down to cases. I guess we understand one another.”
Oliver Meek didn’t know what the other meant, but he had to say something.
“I guess we do,” he agreed.
“All right, then,” said Hoffman. “I’ve built up a sweet little racket here and I don’t like fellows butting in.”
Meek essayed to down his liquor, succeeded, gasped for breath.
“But I could use a man like you,” said Hoffman. “Luke tells me you are handy with the blasters.”
“I practice sometimes,” Meek admitted.
A smile twitched Hoffman’s bearded lips. “We have the town just where we want it. The officials can’t do a thing. Scared to. Marshals always eat rock or skip town. Maybe you
would like to throw in with us. Not much to do, easy pickings.”
“I’m sorry,” said Meek, “but I can’t do that.”
“Listen, Meek,” warned Hoffman, “you’re either with us or you aren’t. We don’t like chiselers here. We know what to do with guys who try to muscle in. I don’t know who you are or where you come from, but I’m telling you this … straight. If you don’t come in, all right … but if you stick around after tonight I can’t promise you protection.”
Meek was silent, mulling the threat.
“You mean,” he finally asked, “that you’re ordering me out if I don’t join your gang?”
Hoffman nodded. “That, big boy, is just exactly what I mean.”
Slow anger and resentment ate at Meek. Who was this Hoffman to order him out of Asteroid City? This was a free Solar System, wasn’t it? No wonder the Rev. Brown was jittery. No wonder the decent people wanted a clean-up.
Meek’s anger mounted, a cold deadly anger that shook him like a frigid hand. An anger that almost frightened him, for very seldom in his life had he been really angry.
He rose slowly from the table, hitched his gun belt to a comfortable position.
“The town’s been without a marshal for a long time, hasn’t it?” he asked.
Hoffman’s laugh boomed out. “You bet it has. And it’s going to stay that way. The last one took it on the lam. The one before that got killed. The one before that sort of disappeared. …”
Meek spoke slowly, weak eyes burning.
“Horrible condition,” he said. “Something’s got to be done about it.”
The streets were deserted, quiet, a deadly quiet that lurked and hovered, waiting for something to happen.
Oliver Meek polished his marshal’s star with his coat sleeve, glanced up at the dome. Stars glittered, their light distorted by the heavy quartz. Stars in a dead black sky.
Bathed in the weak starlight, the mighty walls of the canyon reared above the dome. A canyon, the only sort of place where a city could rise on one of the planetoids. For the walls protected the dome against the deadly barrage of whizzing debris that continually shrieked down from space. Those mighty cragged mountains and dizzy cliffs were pocked with the blows dealt, through long eons, by that hail of armor-piercing projectiles.
Meek returned his gaze to the street, saw the lights of the Silver Moon. Nervously he felt of the papers in his inside pocket. Warrants for the arrest of John Hoffman for murder, Luke Blaine for murder, Jim Smithers for reckless shooting, Jake Loomis for assault and battery, Robert Blake for robbery.
And suddenly, Oliver Meek was afraid. For death waited him, he knew, inside the swinging doors of the Silver Moon. A death preluded by this quiet street.
Almost as if he were awaking from a dream, he found questions filling his brain. What was he doing here? Why had he gotten himself into a jam like this? What difference did it make to him what happened to Asteroid City?
It had been anger that had made him do it … that unaccountable anger which had flared when Hoffman told him to get out.
After all, what difference would a few days make? He was going to leave anyhow. He’d seen about all there was to see in Asteroid City. He wanted to see the Prowler and the stones with the strange inscriptions on them, but they were sights he could get along without.
If he turned around and walked the other way he could reach his space ship in just a few minutes. There was fuel enough to take him to Ganymede. No one would know until he was already gone. And after he was gone, what would he care what anybody thought?
He stood irresolutely, arguing with himself. Then he shook his head, resumed his march toward the Silver Moon.
A figure stepped from a dark doorway. Meek saw the threatening gleam of steel. His hands streaked toward his gun-butts, but something prodded him in the back and he froze, fingers touching metal.
“All right, marshal,” said a mocking voice. “You just turn around and walk the other way.”
He felt his guns lifted from their holsters and he turned around and walked. Footsteps crunched beside him and behind him, but otherwise he walked in silence.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked, his voice just a trifle shaky.
One of the men laughed.
“Just on a little trip, marshal. Out to take a look at Juno. It’s a right pretty sight at night.”
Juno wasn’t pretty. For the most part, there was little of it one could see. The stars shed little light and the depressions were in shadow, while the cragged mountain tops seemed like shimmering mirages in the ghostly starlight.
The ship lay on a plateau between a needle-like range and a deep, shadowed valley.
“Now, marshal,” said one of the men, “you stay right here. You’ll see the Sun come up over that mountain back there. Interesting. Dawn on Juno is something to remember.”
Meek started forward, but the other waved him back with his pistol.
“You’re leaving me here?” shrieked Meek.
“Why sure,” the man said. “You wanted to see the Solar System, didn’t you?”
They backed away from him, guns in hand. Frozen in terror, he watched them enter the ship, saw the port close. An instant later the ship roared away, the backwash of its tubes buffeting Meek to the ground.
He struggled to his feet, watching the blasting tubes until they were out of sight. Clumsily he stepped forward and then stopped. There was no place to go … nothing to do.
Loneliness and fear swept over him in terrible waves of anguish. Fear that dwarfed any emotion he had ever felt. Fear of the ghostly shimmer of the peaks, fear of the shadow-blackened valley, fear of space and the mad, cold intensity of unwinking stars.
He fought for a grip on himself. It was fear such as this that drove men mad in space. He’d read about that, heard about it. Fear of the loneliness and the terrible depths of space … fear of the indifference of endless miles of void, fear of the unknown that always lurked just at elbow distance.
“Meek,” he told himself, “you should have stayed at home.”
Dawn came shortly, but no such dawn as one would see on Earth. Just a gradual dimming of the stars, a gradual lifting of the blacker darkness as a larger star, the Sun, swung above the peaks.
The stars still shone, but a gray light filtered over the landscape, made the mountains solid things instead of ghostly shapes.
Jagged peaks loomed on one side of the plateau, fearsome depths on the other. A meteor thudded somewhere to his right and Meek shuddered. There was no sound of the impact but he could feel the vibrations of the blow as the whizzing mass struck the cliffs.
But it was foolish to be afraid of meteors, he told himself. He had greater and more immediate worries.
There were less than eight hours of air left in the tanks of his space suit. He had no idea where he was, although he knew that many miles of rugged, fearsome country stretched between him and Asteroid City.
The space suit carried no food and no water, but that was of minor moment, he realized, for his air would give out long before he felt the pangs of thirst or hunger.
He sat down on a massive boulder and tried to think. There wasn’t much to think about. Everywhere his thoughts met black walls. The situation, he told himself, was hopeless.
If only he hadn’t come to Asteroid City in the first place! Or having come, if he had only minded his business, this never would have happened. If he hadn’t been so anxious to show off what he knew about card dealing tricks. If only he hadn’t agreed to be sworn in as marshal. If he’d swallowed his pride and left when Hoffman told him to.
He brushed away such thoughts as futile, took stock of his surroundings.
The cliff on the right hand side was undercut, overhanging several hundred feet of level ground.
Ponderously, he heaved himself off the boulder, wandered aimlessly up the wider tongue o
f plateau. The undercut, he saw, grew deeper, forming a deep cleft, as if someone had furrowed out the mountain side. Heavy shadows clung within it.
Suddenly he stopped, riveted to the ground, scarcely daring to breathe.
Something was moving in the deep shadow of the undercut. Something that seemed to glint faintly with reflected light.
The thing lurched forward and, in the fleeting instant before he turned and ran, Oliver Meek had an impression of a barrel-like body, a long neck, a cruel mouth, monstrous eyes that glowed with hidden fires.
There was no speculation in Oliver Meek’s mind. From the description given him by Stiffy, from the very terror of the thing, he knew the being shambling toward him was the Asteroid Prowler.
With a shriek of pure fear, Meek turned and fled and behind him came the Prowler, its head swaying on the end of its whip-like neck.
Meek’s legs worked like pistons, his breath gasping in his throat, his body soaring through space as he covered long distances at each leap under the influence of lesser gravity.
Thunderous blasts hammered at the earphones in his helmet and as he ran he craned his head skyward.
Shooting down toward the plateau, forward rockets braking, was a small spaceship!
Hope rose within him and he glanced back over his shoulder. Hope died instantly. The Prowler was gaining on him, gaining fast.
Suddenly his legs gave out. Simply folded up, worn out with the punishment they had taken. He threw up his arms to shield his helmet plate and sobbed in panic.
The Asteroid Prowler would get him now. Sure as shooting. Just at the minute rescue came, the Prowler would get him.
But the Prowler didn’t get him. Nothing happened at all. Surprised, he sat up and spun around, crouching.
The ship had landed, almost at the edge of the plateau and a man was tumbling out of the port. The Prowler had changed his course, was galloping toward the ship.
The man from the ship ran in leaping bounds, a pistol in one gloved hand, and his yelp of terror rang in Meek’s earphones.
“Run, dang you. Run! That dad-blamed Prowler will be after us any minute now.”
The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories Page 18