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The Next Time We Die
By ROBERT MOORE WILLIAMS
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _We journey to far places, driven on by ideals. We fight forlost causes, sacrificing our lives because the things we fight for seemworthwhile. But are we right? Are they worth being killed over? Perhaps.Then again, maybe we'll know better--The Next Time We Die _]
Now in the nooning, with the sun high overhead and the shadows huddlingdispiritedly at their sides, the threat that existed in this wild desertwas completely invisible.
The girl, Nora Martin, said, "What I don't understand is why we were sostupid as to come here in the first place. We could have stayed on Earthand had homes and families." Becoming conscious of what she had said,she hastily corrected herself. "I mean, each of us could have had a homeand a family."
Pike McLean shifted the muzzle of the Rangeley just a trifle, adjustingit so that the cross hairs in the periscope sight covered the exact spotwhere he expected, and hoped, the next native would appear. He tried todig the sand out of his eyes. Since he had sand on his hands, this onlygot more of the gritty particles into his eyes. He wished fervidly for adeep satisfying breath of the thick muggy air of Earth before he died.
"This air, there's not anything to it," he muttered.
* * * * *
The girl glanced sharply at him. She had eyes that were as blue as theskies of Earth on a sunny day. The dirt on her nose made her look human.At this moment, the eyes had anger in them. Back of the anger wereunshed tears.
"Did you hear what I said?" she repeated.
McLean shifted his long body so that it lay a little lower in thedepression in the sand. "I guess you came here because you're anarcheologist and you're getting paid to examine ruins. I came herebecause I'm a roustabout who is supposed to be able to do anything,which is what I'm getting paid for." He paused and removed an offendinggrain of sand from his right eyelid. "Dying is not much," he continued."Why are you so frazzled about it? It doesn't even hurt, when you reallyget to it, that is."
"You talk as if you have died before!"
"Why, I have," he answered, surprise in his voice. "Hundreds of times.Since we first crawled out on the mud flats and grew feet and left ourgills behind us, that's a long time. We've been dying ever since, that'sfor sure. And probably for a much longer time."
"I thought you were talking about reincarnation," the astonishedarcheologist said.
"So I was," the roustabout answered. "They're only different approachesand aspects of the same problem. We reincarnate in order to take anothercrack at the puzzle of evolution. Some day we'll solve it! Then we willfall heir to the farther stars instead of just this little old duck pondof a solar system."
"You sound very sure of yourself. What proof--"
"It's in the book," McLean answered. "We're _homo sapiens_. And thatmeans something. The mud flats didn't stop us. We crawled off of themand on to the high ground and into the forests and overran a planet. Theatom bomb didn't hold us up too long, even when we got to using it oneach other. Where in all that space--" His hand swept upward in an arcthat included all the vast expanse of stars dimly seen here on thisworld even at high noon. "--is anything that can stop us, when we cankeep coming back to take another crack at the problem? Any problem, Idon't care what it is, can be solved if we can keep working at it longenough!" Enthusiasm sounded in his voice, then faded out. He drew hishand down. Two of the fingers were missing.
McLean stared at the ooze of blood and plasma and set his lips againstthe pain. "That damned needle ray can sure knock a hunk out of a man,"he said.
"Oh, Pike, why did you have to be so careless!" Sliding the pack fromher back, she opened it. Taking great care not to get her head above theedge of the hole, she opened the first-aid kit and applied antisepticsand bandages to the stumps of the two fingers. Alternately she scoldedand then soothed him.
"You do that real well," he said, approvingly. "You should have been amama, instead of an archeologist, and raised a whole slather of kids, soyou could bandage all their cuts and pat away all their bruises."
A longing as deep as the seas of Earth showed in her blue eyes."That--that was what I wanted. But I got side-tracked into aprofession." The longing was washed away in a film of sudden tears.
* * * * *
McLean closed his lips even tighter. He applied one eye to the sight ofthe Rangeley, now adjusted to function as a periscope. Level andapparently free of all danger, the grim red sands swept away to the lowmountains in the distance. The air was so clear and so thin that hecould even see the ruins of the city that had been their destinationwhen they had left the ship. The city was a vast mass of tumbled masonrysprawled on treeless, forgotten hills. On the sand nothing moved. Yetdeath was there in front of him, and his eye had certainly passed overit.
"The nice little foxes are all in their nice little holes," he said.
The girl made a wan effort to smile. "How are your fingers? I mean, dothey hurt much?"
"They feel like I don't have them." Grinning at his own joke, McLeanswung the sight of the Rangeley around to their desert buggy. Theover-size tires loomed up like huge rubber doughnuts sproutingmysteriously out of the desert sand. The door of the car was invitinglyopen.
"It's only a quarter of a mile," he said. "We could sprint that far. Buthow could we run at all without legs?"
"We have legs," the girl said eagerly. "Let's try to make the car."
"We wouldn't have 'em, if we jumped out of this hole and startedrunning. The little foxes have sharp teeth."
"Oh." Her voice dropped as the color faded from her eyes. "Then what arewe going to do?"
"Stay here and hope they send out another desert car from the shiplooking for us. If we don't return in a reasonable time, they may becomecurious about us."
"And if they don't come?"
"We'll try to out-fox the foxes."
"If we had a radio--"
"We do, but it's in our buggy. If we were there, we wouldn't need aradio. The dur-steel body of the car would stop the beam from thatneedle gun. How the hell does it happen that wild tribesmen, with noscience and no industry, living here in a desert, have a weapon likethat needle ray gun?"
"When they built their city there, they weren't desert tribesmen," thegirl explained. "They were going somewhere, then, and they had scienceand at least light industry, and skilled workers. When they came back tothe desert, they left everything behind them except their weapons. Aprimitive will always choose a weapon over anything else. He will valueit as he values his life, because that is what it is."
"Why did they come back to a desert?"
"That's one thing we expected to discover in their ruined city, Pike."The girl's voice took on the patient tone of the expert instructing theamateur. "War with a neighboring tribe, in which they were defeated,might have been the reason. Change in climate might have been a factor.Perhaps there were other reasons too, famine, pestilence. They startedup, then went back. This has happened so often that it seems to me thatthe seeds of decay always sprout at the same time as the seeds ofgreatness."
"I wish I were an archeologist and a philosopher, and understood allthose things," McLean said, longingly.
"You are a man, which is more important."
"Do you mean _male_?"
"No. Man. _M-a-n_." She spelled the word for him. "Man. The highestlevel reached by the life force on Ea
rth, to date. Or in the SolarSystem, as we know it."
"Oh, you mean the top of the heap," McLean said. "Sure, we know that.But the little foxes hiding in their nice little holes don't know it.They don't think that being a man is so much." A thin sparkle of lightflickered through the air above his head as he spoke. He had theimpression that a crackling sound went with the death beam, like therustle of static in space. "See! That's what they think of us! Targets!"
* * * * *
The girl dodged downward. McLean advised her not to
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