The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  Dead, the Martian trash!

  No time. Just a dead man’s face, smiling.

  And then something touched me. Thought, a sudden bursting flame of it, hit my mind, drawing it back like a magnet drawing heavy steel. Somebody’s thought, directed at me. A raw, sick horror, a fear, and a compassion so deep it shook my heart—One clear, sharp thrust of word-images came to me now.

  “He looks like Lucifer crying for Heaven,” the message said. “His eyes. Oh, Dark Angel, his eyes!”

  I shut those eyes. Sweat broke cold on me, I swayed, and then I made the world come back into focus again. Sunlight, sand, noise and stench and people crowding, the thunder of rockets from the spaceport two Mars miles away. All in focus. I looked up and saw the girl.

  She was standing just beyond the dead man, almost touching him. There was a young fellow with her. I saw him vaguely, but he didn’t matter then. Nothing mattered but the girl. She was wearing a blue dress, and she was staring at me with a smoke-gray gaze out of a face as white as stripped bone.

  The sunlight and the noise and people went away again, leaving me alone with her. I felt the locket burn me under my spaceman’s black, and my heart seemed to stop beating.

  “Missy,” I said. “Missy.”

  “Like Lucifer, but Lucifer turned saint,” her mind was saying.

  I laughed of a sudden, short and harsh. The world came back in place and stayed there, and so did I.

  Missy. Missy, bosh! Missy’s been dead a long, long time.

  It was the red hair that fooled me. The same dark red hair, straight and heavy as a horse’s tail, coiled on her white neck, and her smoke-gray eyes. Something, too, about her freckles and the way her mouth pulled up on one side as though it couldn’t stop smiling.

  Otherwise, she didn’t look much like Missy. She was taller and bonier. Life had kicked her around some, and she showed it. Missy never had worn that tired, grim look. I don’t know whether she had developed a tough, unbreakable character, such as the girl before me, either. I couldn’t read minds, then.

  This girl, looking at me, had a lot in her mind that she wouldn’t want known. I didn’t like the idea of her catching me in a rare off-moment.

  “What do you babies think you’re doing here?” I said.

  The young man answered me. He was a lot like her—plain, simple, a lot tougher inside than he looked—a kid who had learned how to take punishment and go on fighting. He was sick now, and angry, and a little scared.

  “We thought, in broad daylight it would be safe,” he answered.

  “Day or night, it’s all the same to this hole. I’d get out.”

  Without moving, the girl was still looking at me, not even realizing that she was doing it. “White hair,” she was thinking. “But he isn’t old. Not much older than Brad, in spite of the lines. Suffering, not age.”

  “You’re off the Queen of Jupiter, aren’t you?” I asked them.

  I knew they were. The Queen was the only passenger tub in Jekkara then. I was interested only because she looked like Missy. But Missy had been dead, a long time.

  The young man she thought of as Brad spoke.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re going out to Jupiter, to the colonies.” He pulled at the girl, gently. “Come on, Virgie. We’d better go back to the ship.”

  I was sweating, and cold. Colder than the corpse at my feet. I laughed, but not loud.

  “Yes,” I said. “Get back to the ship, where it’s safe.”

  The girl hadn’t stirred, hadn’t taken her eyes off me.

  Still afraid, not so compassionate now, but still with her mind on me.

  “His eyes burn,” she was thinking. “What color are they? No color, really. Just dark and cold and burning. They’ve looked into horror—and heaven…”

  I let her look into them. She flushed after a while, and I smiled. She was angry, but she couldn’t look away, and I held her, smiling, until the young man pulled her again, not so gently.

  “Come on, Virgie.”

  She broke free from me then, turning with an angular, coltish grace. My stomach felt like somebody stabbed it, suddenly. The way she held her head…

  She looked back at me, sullenly, not wanting to.

  “You remind me of someone,” she said. “Are you from the Queen of Jupiter, too?”

  Her voice was like Missy’s. Deeper, maybe. Throatier. But enough like it.

  “Yeah. Spaceman, First Class.”

  “Then maybe that’s where I noticed you.” She turned the wedding ring on her finger, not thinking about it, and frowned. “What’s your name?”

  “Goat,” I said. “J. Goat.”

  “Jay Goat,” she repeated. “What an odd name. But it’s not unusual. I wonder why it interests me so much.”

  “Come on, Virgie,” Brad said crossly.

  I didn’t give her any help. I looked at her until she flushed crimson and turned away. I read her thoughts. They were worth reading.

  She and Brad went off toward the spaceport, walking close together, back to the Queen of Jupiter, and I stumbled over the dead Martian at my feet.

  The pinched grayness had crawled in over his face. His green eyes were glazed and already sunken, and his blood was turning dark on the stones. Just another corpse.

  I laughed. I put my black boot under the twist of his back and pushed him off into the sullen, red-brown water, and I laughed because my own blood was still hot and beating in me so hard it hurt.

  He was dead, so I let him go.

  I smiled at the splash and the fading ripples. “She was wrong,” I thought. “It isn’t Jay. It’s just plain J. Goat. J for Judas.”

  There were about ten Mars hours to kill before the Queen blasted off. I had a good run at the getak tables in Madam Kan’s. She found me some special desert-cactus brandy and a Venusian girl with a hide like polished emerald and golden eyes.

  She danced for me, and she knew how. It wasn’t a bad ten hours, for a Jekkara dive.

  Missy, the dead Martian, and the girl named Virgie went down in my subconscious where they belonged, and didn’t leave even a ripple. Things like that are like the pain of an old wound when you twist it. They get you for a minute, but they don’t last. They aren’t important any more.

  Things can change. You planet-bound people build your four little walls of thought and roof them in with convention, and you think there’s nothing else. But space is big, and there are other worlds, and other ways. You can learn them. Even you. Try it, and see.

  I finished the fiery green brandy. I filled the hollow between the Venusian dancer’s emerald breasts with Martian silver and kissed her, and went away with a faint taste of fish on my lips, back toward the spaceport.

  I walked. It was night, with a thin, cold wind rustling the sand and the low moons spilling silver and wild black shadows across the dunes. I could see my aura glowing, pale gold against the silver.

  I felt swell. The only thing I thought about concerning the Queen of Jupiter was that pretty soon my job would be finished and I’d be paid.

  I stretched with a pleasure you wouldn’t know anything about, and it was a wonderful thing to be alive.

  It was lonely out there on the moonswept desert a mile from the spaceport, when Gallery stepped out from behind a ruined tower that might have been a lighthouse once, when the desert was a sea.

  Gallery was king-snipe of the glory hole. He was Black Irish, and moderately drunk, and his extra-sensory perception was quivering in him like a sensitive diaphragm. I knew he could see my aura. Very faintly, and not with his eyes, but enough. I knew he had seen it the first time he met me, when I signed aboard the Queen of Jupiter on Venus.

  You meet them like that occasionally. Celts especially, and Romanies, both Earth and Martian, and a couple of tribes of Venusians. Extra-sensory perception is born into them. Mostly it’s crude, but it can get in your way.

  It was in my way now. Gallery had four inches on me, and about thirty pounds, and the whisky he’d drunk was just en
ough to make him fast, mean, and dangerous. His fists were large.

  “You ain’t human,” he said softly.

  He was smiling. He might have been making love to me, with his smile and his beautiful soft voice. The sweat on his face made it look like polished wood in the moonlight.

  “No, Gallery,” I said. “Not any more. Not for a long time.”

  He swayed slightly, over his flexed knees. I could see his eyes. The blueness was washed out of them by the moonlight. There was only fear left, hard and shining.

  His voice was still soft, still singing. “What are you, then? And what will you be wantin’ with the ship?”

  “Nothing with the ship, Gallery. Only with the people on her. And as to what I am, what difference does it make?”

  “None,” said Gallery. “None. Because I’m going to kill you, now.”

  I laughed, not making any sound.

  He nodded his black head slowly. “Show me your teeth, if you will. You’ll be showin’ them to the desert sky soon, out of a picked skull.”

  He opened his hands. The racing moonlight showed me a silver crucifix in each of his palms.

  “No, Gallery,” I said softly. “Maybe you could call me a vampire, but I’m not that kind.”

  He closed his hands again over the crosses and started forward, one slow step at a time. I could hear his boots in the blowing sand. I didn’t move.

  “You can’t kill me, Gallery.”

  He didn’t stop. He didn’t speak. The sweat was trickling down his skin. He was afraid, but he didn’t stop.

  “You’ll die here, Gallery, without a priest.”

  He didn’t stop.

  “Go on to the town, Gallery. Hide there till the Queen’s gone. You’ll be safe. Do you love the others enough to die for them?”

  He stopped, then. He frowned, like a puzzled kid. It was a new thought.

  I got the answer before he said it.

  “What does love have to do with it? They’re people.”

  He came on again, and I opened my eyes, wide.

  “Gallery,” I said.

  He was close. Close enough to smell the raw whisky on his breath. I looked up into his face. I caught his eyes and held them, and he stopped, slowly, dragging his feet as though all of a sudden there were weights on them.

  I held his eyes. I could hear his thoughts. They were the same. They’re always the same.

  He raised his fists up, too slowly, as though he might be lifting a man’s weight on each of them. His lips drew back. I could see the wet shine of his teeth and hear the labored breath go between them, hoarse and rough.

  I smiled at him, and held his eyes with mine.

  He went down to his knees. Inch by inch, fighting me, but down. A big man with sweat on his face and blue eyes that couldn’t look away. His hands opened. The silver crosses fell out and lay there glittering on the sand.

  His head went back. The cords roped out in his neck and jerked, and then suddenly he fell over on his side and lay still.

  “My heart,” he whispered. “You’ve stopped it.”

  That’s the only way. What they feel about us is instinct, and even psycho-surgery won’t touch that. Besides, there’s never time.

  He couldn’t breathe, now. He couldn’t speak, but I heard his thoughts. I picked the crucifixes out of the sand and folded his fingers over them.

  He managed to turn his head a little and look at me. He tried to speak, but again it was his thought I answered.

  “Into the Veil, Gallery,” I whispered. “That’s where I’m leading the Queen.”

  I saw his eyes widen and fix. The last thought he had was—well, never mind that. I dragged him back into the ruined tower where no one would be likely to find him for a long time, and started on again for the spaceport. And then I stopped.

  He’d dropped the crosses again. They were lying in the path with the moonlight on them, and I picked them up, thinking I’d throw them out into the blowing sand where they wouldn’t be seen.

  I didn’t. I stood holding them. They didn’t burn my flesh. I laughed.

  Yeah. I laughed. But I couldn’t look at them.

  I went back in the tower and stretched Gallery on his back with his hands crossed on his chest, and closed his eyes. I laid a crucifix on each of his eyelids and went out, this time for good.

  Shirina said once that you could never understand a human mind completely no matter how well you knew it. That’s where the suffering comes in. You feel fine, everything’s beautiful, and then all of a sudden a trapdoor comes open somewhere in your brain, and you remember.

  Not often, and you learn to kick them shut, fast. But even so, Flack is the only one of us that still has dark hair, and he never had a soul to begin with.

  Well, I kicked the door shut on Gallery and his crosses, and half an hour later the Queen of Jupiter blasted off for the Jovian colonies, and a landing she was never going to make.

  2 Voyage into Doom

  Nothing happened until we hit the outer fringe of the Asteroid Belt. I’d kept watch on the minds of my crewmates, and I knew Gallery hadn’t mentioned me to anyone else. You don’t go around telling people that the guy in the next bunk gives off a yellow glow and isn’t human, unless you want to wind up in a straitjacket. Especially when such things are something you sense but can’t see, like electricity.

  When we came into the danger zone inside the Belt, they set the precautionary watches at the emergency locks on the passenger decks, and I was assigned to one of them. I went up to take my station.

  Just at the top of the companionway I felt the first faint reaction of my skin, and my aura began to pulse and brighten.

  I went on to the Number Two lock and sat down.

  I hadn’t been on the passenger deck before. The Queen of Jupiter was an old tub from the Triangle trade, refitted for deep-space hauling. She held together, and that’s all. She was carrying a heavy cargo of food, seed, clothing, and farm supplies, and about five hundred families trying for a fresh start in the Jovian colonies.

  I remembered the first time I saw Jupiter. The first time any man from Earth ever saw Jupiter. That was long ago.

  Now the deck was jammed. Men, women, kids, mattresses, bags, bundles, and what have you. Martians, Venusians, Terrans, all piled in together, making a howling racket and smelling very high in the combined heat of the sun and the press of bodies.

  My skin was tingling and beginning to crawl. My aura was brighter.

  I saw the girl. The girl named Virgie with her thick red hair and her colt’s way of moving. She and her husband were minding a wiry, green-eyed Martian baby while its mother tried to sleep, and they were both thinking the same thing.

  “Maybe, some day when things are better, we’ll have one of our own.”

  I remember thinking that Missy would have looked like that holding our kid, if we’d ever had one.

  My aura pulsed and glowed.

  I watched the little worlds flash by, still far ahead of the ship, all sizes, from pebbles to habitable planetoids, glittering in the raw sunlight and black as space on their shadow sides. People crowded up around the ports, and I got to looking at one old man standing almost beside me.

  He had space stamped all over him, in the way he carried his lean frame and the lines in his leathery face, and the hungry-hound look of his eyes watching the Belt. An old rocket-hustler who had done plenty in his day, and remembered it all.

  And then Virgie came up. Of all the women on deck it had to be Virgie. Brad was with her, and she was still holding the baby. She had her back to me, looking out.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said softly. “Oh, Brad, just look at it!”

  “Wonderful, and deadly,” the old spaceman said to himself. He looked around and smiled at Virgie. “Your first trip out?”

  “Yes, for both of us. I suppose we’re very starry-eyed about it, but it’s strange.” She made a little helpless gesture.

  “I know. There aren’t any words for it.” He turned ba
ck to the port. His voice and his face were blank, but I could read his mind.

  “I used to kick the supply ships through to the first settlement, fifty years ago,” he said. “There were ten of us, doing that. I’m the only one left.”

  “The Belt was dangerous then, before they got the Rosson deflectors,” Brad said.

  “The Belt,” said the old man softly, “only got three of them.”

  Virgie lifted her red head. “Then what…”

  The old man didn’t hear her. His thoughts were way off.

  “Six of the best men in space, and then, eleven years ago, my son,” he said, to no one.

  A woman standing beside him turned her head. I saw the wide, raw shine of terror in her eyes, and the sudden stiffness of her lips.

  “The Veil?” she whispered. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it? The Veil?”

  The old man tried to shut her up, but Virgie broke in.

  “What about the Veil?” she asked. “I’ve heard of it, vaguely. What is it?”

  The Martian baby was absorbed in a silver chain she wore around her neck. I remember thinking it looked familiar. Probably she’d had it on the first time I saw her. My aura glowed, a hot bright gold.

  The woman’s voice, answering, had an eerie quality of distance in it, like an echo. She was staring out of the port now.

  “Nobody knows,” she said. “It can’t be found, or traced, or tested at all. My brother is a spaceman. He saw it once from a great distance, reaching from nowhere to swallow a ship. A veil of light. It faded, and the ship was gone! My brother saw it out here, close to the Belt.”

  “There’s no more reason to expect it here than anywhere,” the old spaceman said roughly. “It’s taken ships as far in as Earth’s orbit. There’s no reason to be afraid.”

  My aura burned around me like a cloud of golden light, and my skin was alive with a subtle current.

  The green-eyed Martian baby yanked the silver chain suddenly and crowed, holding its hands high. The thing on the end of the chain, that had been hidden under Virgie’s dress, spun slowly round and round, and drew my eyes, and held them.

  I must have made some sound, because Virgie looked around and saw me. I don’t know what she thought. I didn’t know anything for a long time, except that I was cold, as though some of the dead, black space outside had come in through the port somehow and touched me.