by Anthology
Of course, it was not she. Of course, it could not be. This was merely one of those things previewing the preparation of a skeleton with a ring in a—Stop!
He moved from the cave, out into the wind, and stood there. He heard nothing—did he? A pound of feet—such as death running might make.
A scream!
He ran around the shoulder of the mountain, stood there, panting, clasping his helmeted head between his trembling, cold hands.
“Lieutenant!”
A voice, whipped into his imagination by the ungodly wind!
He would not believe it.
A form, stumbling out of the pale night! Running toward him, its lips moving, saying words that the wind took away. And it was Laurette Overland, forming in his imagination now that he had gone completely mad.
He waited there, in cold amusement. There was small use in allowing himself to be fooled. And yet—and yet—the ring had to come back; to him. This was Laurette Overland, and she was bringing it—for him to wear. That was selfish of her. If she had the ring, if she had dug it up, why didn’t she wear it?
Then she would be the skeleton.
Then there would be two skeletons!
His mind froze, then surged forward into life and sanity. A cold cry of agony escaped him. He stumbled forward and caught the girl up in his arms. He could feel the-supple firmness of her body even through the folds of her undistended pressure suit.
Laurette’s lips, red and full against the ghastly induced paleness of her face, parted and words came out. Yet he could make no sense of it, for the unimaginable wind, and the cold horror lancing through his mind occluded words and sentences.
“—had to . . . out. A hundred pounds.” He felt her hysterical laugh. So the ship had started to fall. She had bailed out, had swept to solid ground on streams of flame shooting from the rocket jets in the shoulders of her suit. This much he knew. Hours and hours she had fought her way—toward the plain. Because, she remembered something. The ship was gone. Safe. She remembered something that was important and it had to do with the skeleton and the ring. She had to get out. It was her part in the ghastly across-the-millions-of-years stage play. She had to dig up the ring.
He held her out at arm’s length and looked down at her gloved hands. Yes, there was mud on them. So the ring had not been in the cave.
His eyes shuddered upward to hers.
“Give me the ring.” His lips formed the words slowly.
“No, no, lieutenant,” she blurted out. “It’s not going to be that way. Don’t you see? It’s Amos! Amos!”
“You must be crazy to have come back!” he panted. He shook in sudden overwhelming, maddening fury. “You’re crazy anyway!”
He suddenly wrenched at her hands, forced them open. But there was no ring. He shook her madly.
“Where’s the ring? Give it to me, you damned little fool! If you’re wearing it—if you think for one moment—you can’t do this—”
The wind whipped the words away from her, she knew, even as that which she was saying was lost to him.
He stopped talking, and with a cold ferocity wrapped one arm around her, and with the other started to unbuckle her gloves with his own bare hands. She struggled suddenly, tigerishly. She wrenched herself away from him. She ran backward three steps. She looked up into the sky for one brief second, at the growing monster. He could see the cold, frantic horror settling on her face. Collision! And it was a matter of moments! And he, the true skeleton, did not have the ring!
He moved toward her, one slow step at a time, his eyes wild, his jaw set with purpose.
She darted past him. He whirled, panting, went frantically after her. And every step he took grew more leaden, for the moment was here. The collision was about to occur. And the girl was running toward the cave.
Laurette vanished around the shoulder of the mountain. The cave swallowed her. His steps slowed down. He stood there, drew a deep, tremulous breath. Then he entered the cave, and stood facing her, the wind’s howl diminishing.
She said, coldly, “We haven’t much time to talk or fight, lieutenant. You’re acting like a madman. Here.” She stooped and picked up his gloves. She held them out. “Put these on.”
He said, “Give me the ring.”
She stared at him through the gloom, at his pretematurally wide eyes.
“All right,” she said. She unbuckled the glove of her right hand. She moved close to him, holding his eyes with her own. “If you want to be the skeleton, you may.”
He felt her fingers touch his right hand. He felt something cold traveling up his fingers. He felt the ring inclosing his finger. Yes, the ring was on there, where it should be. He felt it—coldly. It could not very well be his imagination—could it? Of course not. She would not try to fool him. Yet her eyes were hypnotic, and he was in a daze. Feebly, he knew he should resist. But she forced his glove over his right hand, and he heard the buckles click. Then the left hand glove went on, and was buckled.
Her arms crept up around his neck. Tears glinted unashamedly in her eyes.
“Hold me tight, lieutenant,” she whispered huskily. “You know . . . you know, there may be a chance.”
“No, there isn’t, Laurette. There can’t be. I’ve got the ring on my finger.”
He could feel her drawing a deep breath. “Of course—you’ve got the ring on your finger! I think it can’t be very far away, lieutenant. Hold me.” Her voice was a whimper. “Maybe we’ll live.”
“Not I. Perhaps you.”
“This cave, this very mountain, lived through the holocaust. And perhaps we will, too. Both of us.”
She was being illogical, he knew. But he had sunk into a dull, apathetic state of mind. Let her try to believe what was impossible. He had the ring on his finger. He did.
Did he?
He jerked. He had felt the cold of its metal encircling his finger. He had thought he had felt it! His fingers moved. A dull, sickening sense of utter defeat engulfed him. This was defeat. She had the ring! She was-the skeleton!
And there was no time to change it. There would be no time. The blood rushed in his head, giddily. He caught her eyes, and held them, and tried to let her know in that last moment that he knew what she had done. She bit her lip and smiled. Then—her face clouded. Clouded as his thoughts clouded. It was like that.
He heard no monstrous sound, for here was sound that was no sound. It was simply the ponderous headlong meeting of two planets. They had struck. They were flattening out against each other, in the immeasurable second when consciousness was whipped away, and fragments of rock, some large, some small, were dribbling out in a fine frothy motion from underneath the circle of collision. The planet was yawning mightily. A jigsaw of pieces, a Humpty Dumpty that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put together again. This was the mighty prelude to the forming of an asteroid belt, and of a girl skeleton on Asteroid No. 1007.
He was alive.
Alive and thinking.
It did not seem possible.
He was wedged into the back of the cave. A boulder shut off light, and a projecting spur of it reached out and pinioned him with gentle touch against the wall at his back. He was breathing. His suit was inflated with ten pounds of pressure. Electric coils were keeping his body warm. He was alive and the thoughts were beginning in his brain. Slow, senseless thoughts. Thoughts that were illogical. He could not even bring himself to feel emotion. He was pinioned here in the darkness, and out there was an asteroid of no air, small gravity, and a twenty-mile altitude.
Laurette Overland would be dead, and she would be wearing the ring. Tears, unashamed, burned at his eyes.
How long had he been here, wedged in like this: minutes, hours, days? Where were Overland, Masters, Braker and Yates? Would they land and move this boulder away?
Something suddenly seemed to shake the mountain. He felt the vibration rolling through his body. What had caused that? Some internal explosion, an aftermath of the collision? That did
not seem likely, for the vibration had been brief, barely perceptible.
He stood there, wedged, his thoughts refusing to work except with a monotonous regularity. Mostly he thought of the skeleton; so that skeleton had existed before the human race!
After a while, it might have been five minutes or an hour or more, he became aware of arms and legs and a sluggishly beating heart. He raised his arms slowly, like an automaton that has come to life after ages of motionlessness, and pushed against the boulder that hemmed him in. It seemed to move away from him easily. He stepped to one side and imparted a ponderous, rocking motion to the boulder. It fell forward and stopped. Light, palely emanating from the starry, black night that overhung Asteroid No. 1007, burst through over the top of the boulder. Good.
There was plenty of room to crawl through—after a while. He leaned against the boulder, blood surging weakly in his veins.
He felt a vibration so small that it might have been imagination. Then again, it might have been the ship, landing on the asteroid. At least, there was enough likelihood of that to warrant turning his headset receiver on.
He listened, and heard the dull undertone of a carrier wave; or was that the dull throb of blood against his temples? No, it couldn’t be. He strained to listen, coherent thoughts at last making headway in his mind.
Then:
“Go on, professor—Masters.” That was Braker’s voice! “We’ll all go crazy if we don’t find out who the skeleton is.”
Then Braker had landed the ship, after escaping the holocaust that had shattered that before-the-asteroids world! Tony almost let loose a hoarse breath, then withheld it, savagely. If Braker heard that, he might suspect something. Whatever other purpose Tony had in life now, the first and most important was to get the Hampton away from Braker.
Overland muttered, his voice lifeless, “If it’s my daughter, I’d rather you’d go first, Braker.”
Masters spoke. “I’ll go ahead, professor. I’d do anything to—” His voice broke.
Overland muttered, “Don’t take it so hard, son. We all have our bad moments. It couldn’t be a skeleton, anyway.”
“Why not?” That was Yates. Then, “Oh, hell, yes! It couldn’t be, could it, professor? You know, this is just about the flukiest thing that has ever happened I guess. Sometimes it makes me laugh! On again, off again!”
“Finnegan,” finished Braker absently. “Say, I don’t get it. This time business. You say the gravity of that planet was holding us back in time like a rubber band stretched tight. When the planet went, the rubber band broke—there wasn’t that gravity any more. And then we snapped back to our real time. But what if Crow and your daughter weren’t released like that? Then we ought to find the skeleton—maybe two of ’em.”
“The gravity of the asteroid would not be enough to hold them back,” Overland said wearily.
“Then I don’t get it,” Braker snapped with exasperation. “This is the present, our real present. Back there is the ledge that cracked our ship up, so it has to be the present. Then how come Crow said he saw a skeleton? Say,” he added, in a burst of anger, “do you think that copper was pulling the wool over our eyes? Well, I’ll be—”
Yates said, “Grow up! Crow was telling the truth.”
Overland said, “The skeleton will be there. The lieutenant saw it.”
Masters: “Maybe he saw his own skeleton.”
Yates: “Say, that’s right!”
Braker: “Well, why not? The same ring was in two different places at the same time, so I guess the same skeleton could be in Crow at the same time as in the cave. It’s a fact, and you don’t talk yourself out of it.”
Tony’s head was whirling. What in heaven were they talking about? Were they intimating that the release of gravity, when the planet broke up, released everything back to the real present, as if some sort of bond had been broken? His hands started to tremble. Of course. It was possible. The escapage of gravitons had thrust them back into the past. Gravitons, the very stuff of gravity, had held them there. And when that one and a half gravity had dispersed, when the gravitons were so far distant that they no longer exerted that tension, everything had snapped back—to the present!
Everything! His thoughts turned cold. Somewhere, somehow, something was terribly wrong. His head ached. He clenched his hands, and listened again. For a full minute, there was no voice. Tony could envision them walking along, Masters and Overland in front, Braker and Yates behind, making their slow way to the cave, Overland dreading what he was to find there.
Then: “Hurry it up, professor. Should be right around here.”
Overland whispered, throatily, “There it is, Braker. My God!” He sounded as if he were going all to pieces.
“The skeleton!” Yates blurted out, burs in his voice. “Ye gods, professor, d’you suppose—Why sure—they just weren’t snapped back.”
Shaking, pasty white of face, Tony clawed his way halfway up the boulder. He hung there, just able to look outside. The whole floor of the cave was visible. And the skeleton lay there, gleaming white, and the ring shone on its tapering finger!
Laurette.
He lifted his head, conscious that his eyes were smarting painfully. Through a blur, he saw Braker, Yates, Masters and Overland, standing about thirty feet distant from the cave, silent, speechless, staring at the skeleton.
Braker said, his voice unsteady, “It’s damned strange, isn’t it? We knew it was going to be there, and there it is, and it robs you of your breath.”
Yates cleared his throat, and said firmly, “Yeah, but who is it? Crow or the girl?”
Overland took a step forward, his weak eyes straining.
“It’s not a very long skeleton, is it?” he whispered.
Braker said, harshly, “Now don’t try talking yourself into anything, professor. You can’t see the skeleton well enough from here to tell who it is. Masters, stop shaking.” His words were implicit with scorn. “Move over there and don’t try any funny stuff like you did on the ship a while ago. I should have blasted you then. I’m going to take a look at that skeleton.”
He went forward sideways, hand on his right hip where the Hampton was holstered.
He came up to the mouth of the cave, stood looking down on the skeleton, frowning. Then he knelt. Tony could see his face working with revulsion, but still he knelt there, as if fascinated.
Tony’s lips stretched back from his teeth. Here’s where Braker got his! He worked his way up to the top of the boulder, tensed, slid over to the other side on his feet. He took one step forward and bent his knees.
Braker raised his head.
His face contorted into a sudden mask of horror.
“You!” he screamed. His eyes bulged.
Tony leaped.
Braker fell backward, face deathly pale, clawing at the Hampton. Tony was on top of him before he could use it. He pinned Braker down, going for the Hampton with hands, feet, and blistering curses. His helmet was a sudden madhouse of consternated voices. Overland, Masters, and Yates swept across his vision. And Yates was coming forward.
He caught hold of the weapon, strained at it mightily, the muscles of his stomach going rigid under the exertion.
Braker kicked at Tony’s midriff with heavy boots, striving to puncture the pressure suit. Tony was forced over on his back, saw Braker’s sweating face grinning mirthlessly into his.
Stars were suddenly occluded by Yates’ body. The man fell to his knees, pinned Tony down, and with Braker’s help broke Tony’s hold on the Hampton.
“Give it to me!” That was Masters’ voice, blasting out shrilly. By sheer surprise, he wrenched the weapon from Yates. Tony flung himself to his feet as the outlaw hurled himself at Masters with a snarl, made a grab for Yates’ foot. Yates tried to shake him off, hopped futilely, then stumbled forward, falling. But he struck against Masters. Masters’ hold on the weapon was weak. It went sailing away in an arc, fell at the mouth of the cave.
“Get it!” Braker’s voice blasted out
as he struggled to his feet. Masters was ahead of him. Wildly, he thrust Braker aside. Yates reached out, tripped Masters. Braker went forward toward the Hampton, and then stopped, stock-still.
A figure stepped from the cave, picked up the weapon, and said, in cold, unmistakable tones.
“Up with them. You, Braker. Yates!”
Braker’s breath released in a long shuddering sigh, and he dropped weakly, helplessly to his knees.
His voice was horrible. “I’m crazy,” he said simply, and continued to kneel there and continued to look up at the figure as if it were a dead figure come to life at which he stared.
The blood drummed upward in Tony’s temples, until it was a wild, crazy, diapason. His shuddering hands raised to clasp his helmet.
Then:
“Laurette,” he whispered brokenly. “Laurette!”
There were six human beings here.
And one skeleton on the floor of the cave.
How long that tableau held, Tony had no way of knowing. Professor Overland, standing off to Tony’s left, arms half raised, a tortured, uncomprehending look on his face. Masters, full length on his stomach, pushing at the ground with his clawed hands to raise his head upward. Yates, in nearly the same position, turned to stone. Braker, his breath beginning to sound out in little, bottled-up rasps.
And the girl, Laurette, she who should have been the skeleton, standing there at the mouth of the cave, her face indescribably pale, as she centered the Hampton on Braker and Yates.
Her voice edged into the aching silence.
“It’s Amos,” she said. She was silent, looking at her father’s haggard face, smiling twistedly.
“Amos,” said Overland hoarsely, saying nothing else, but in that one word showing his utter, dismaying comprehension. He stumbled forward three steps. “We thought—We thought—” He seemed unable to go on. Tears sounded in his voice. He said humbly, “We thought you were the—But no. It’s Amos!” His voice went upward hysterically.
“Stop it!” Laurette’s voice lashed out. She added softly, tenderly, “No, I’m not the skeleton. Far from it, daddy. Amos is the skeleton. He was the skeleton all along. I didn’t realize it might be that way until the ship lifted. Then it seemed that the ship was going to fall and I thought my hundred and five might help after all and anyway, I decided that the lieutenant was all alone down there. And that somehow made me think of the time all the Christmas packages tumbled down on him and how I slapped him.”