“You’ll never know what a price I’ve paid,” he said. “In self-hatred alone—”
“Self-hatred? What do you mean, Dan?”
“Well—for thousands of years symbolic rites and ceremonies have been associated with the planting and harvesting of crops. The ‘bringing in of the sheaves’ has been a kind of glory symbol, something in which a man should take pride. It goes all the way back to the Neolithic Age. But there have been times when I’ve resented every sacrifice I’ve had to lay on that altar. I’ve resented what it has cost me in peace of mind and the time I could have spent in making love to you.”
“Please, Dan. Is that necessary?”
“I think it is. Or don’t you agree?”
“You know I didn’t mean it in that way. I meant—is it necessary for you to pretend we’ve ever let anything interfere with—Dan, why do you make it seem even worse than it is? I know exactly what it has cost you in other ways.”
Blakemore said nothing in reply. He stepped forward instead and took her into his arms, so quickly that it would have been impossible for her to protest, even if she had wanted to. He kissed her hair and lips and eyes, lightly at first and then so vehemently, in an embrace so demanding, that they both gave up all attempt to breathe until the need to do so forced them to draw apart again.
He knew, from the way her eyes were shining, that she would have drawn him back into her arms again if he could have blotted every other thought from his mind and permitted it to happen. But he was forced to shake his head and content himself with a visual caressment of barely five seconds duration.
“I’m drawing it too close,” he said. “He’ll be at the sea wall in fifteen more minutes.”
“All right, Dan,” she said. “But be careful.”
CHAPTER TWO
It took Blakemore less than a minute and a half to descend from the sun room to the ground floor living room of what had once been a more ornately furnished summer residence, cross to the locker room adjacent to it, strip off his lounge suit and emerge into the sunlight at the rear of the dwelling clad in a garment just as flexible, but so tight-fitting that it gave him an almost frogman aspect.
He was still reproaching himself for not having kept his eyes more constantly trained on the sun room clock when he ascended into the astrojet and bent over the controls.
It had been stationed sixty feet from the house, but he had crossed the intervening distance a little faster than he could recall having done in recent weeks over a runway of comparable length. Emergencies that called for haste were certainly as much of a run-of-the-mill occurrence, as the sudden darkening of the sky when storm clouds gathered overhead on a pleasant day in spring, and could hardly have averaged less than eight a month in the course of a year. But there were always a few that made you strain every muscle to outrace the clock.
In a moment the astrojet was moving straight up into the sky, where it would hover like a tiny humming bird a thousand feet in the air until he made another adjustment in the controls which would send it darting forward—to rise higher and encircle the earth or simply to remain at the same altitude and travel toward the coastal shoreline above a field of golden grain.
From the air the field looked just as much like a wind-stirred stretch of open sea as it had from the sun room—perhaps a little more so. But there was one difference. Now the sea itself was visible in the distance, sun-gilded but not as golden as the wheat. Its blueness showed through in patches where the lighthouse towered. There was a region of whitecaps as well, and where the wind-lashed waves were cresting into foam there were glints of purple and a more tarnished kind of gold.
Blakemore was very careful, when he began slowly to encircle the wheat, to keep the astrojet from rising higher, for sharp visibility was of the utmost importance. At a thousand feet the visibility was not too good, but at a lower altitude an improvement in that respect would have been offset by a disadvantage.
It was best to get a wide view first, to take in all of the cultivated acreage with his eyes sweeping back and forth over every part of it, all the way to the sea wall. The instant he detected an unusual stirring in the wheat it would be no problem to descend instantly and hover directly over it.
There was a pair of high-powered binoculars in a case at his waist. But bright sunlight shining through a faint sea mist could be image-distorting, and he preferred to depend on his naked vision and the facile maneuverability of the astrojet. It was almost the equivalent of a body-extension, never failing to give him the feeling, when he was in the air, that he was himself in bodily flight, with a hawk-swift ability to sweep higher or lower in a matter of seconds.
The stirring, when he saw it, was close to the center of the field. It was quite unlike the stirring which was visible in other parts of the field, for the stalks were not being bent in a windswept way, with just their tops in motion. It was as if a gigantic field mouse from the age of archaic mammals was plowing its way through the wheat, opening up a path that did not immediately close in its wake.
Blakemore bent abruptly over the controls, and the astrojet began to descend, so swiftly that it was hovering over the stirring at an altitude of four hundred feet before he could straighten again in the pilot seat.
For an instant he was so occupied with making sure of the jet’s stability at exactly that level that he almost missed his first and only glimpse of the fleeing man.
The gaunt skeleton figure remained in view for only a moment, amidst a bare patch of rust-red earth which his flight had opened up between the stalks. He was turning as he ran, his right arm upraised in a gesture of defiance, the long-barreled weapon glinting in his clasp.
It was so startling a change that Blakemore could only stare down in disbelief, without relaxing his grip on the controls, or giving a thought to the fact that to grasp them too tightly was the opposite of wise.
So the man had gotten some of his courage back!
Blakemore instantly decided not to dwell on that. It was the wrong time to let reluctant admiration take hold of him. It would have been wrong at any time, in view of what such defiance implied.
Apparently something had held the man up—probably an agonizing attempt to get past the neutronic shields—and he was still only half-way to the sea wall.
The fleeing man was clearly trapped now, as much of a prisoner as if every stalk of wheat at the edges of the field had turned into a steel bar. For ten minutes more, at least, Blakemore could safely postpone picking him up, and a thought had occurred to him that made him decide to enlarge the scope of what he’d set out to do.
If he ascended higher again and passed over the sea wall and the wide stretch of beach beyond it the time lost could be spared, and there was something he needed to know. Was the beach deserted? If not, the man who had tried to kill him might have had some companions who were waiting there for him to return. And if there was a boat anchored offshore—
No, that was taking too much for granted. If the neutronic shields had delayed the man he must have tried to escape in another direction. Would he have made such an attempt if he had planned to escape by sea?
Perhaps, Blakemore told himself. It could not be ruled out. The horizontal narrowness of the field would have enabled him to get out of the wheat more quickly by heading north or south and if there had been no shields to stand in his way it would have been natural enough for him to avoid a long flight to the sea wall, circle about and return to the beach eventually by another route.
Or his companions, if they existed, might be waiting for him to rejoin them on another, more remote part of the coast. But Blakemore did not think he would have taken the risk of killing a man and depending on a distant ship to enable him to escape.
Blakemore looked down and saw to his surprise that the astrojet had already begun to ascend again, for his hands had moved automatically on the controls in response to what was perhaps the most mysterious
of all human impulses—a command from the unconscious that leaps a little ahead of what is deliberately willed in a moment of heightened tension.
The astrojet had almost reached the altitude which Blakemore had been careful to maintain before he had caught sight of the stirring when a small, gray-white puff of smoke arose from the wheat eight hundred feet below.
It was dissipated by the wind so quickly that Blakemore failed to realize that the astrojet was being fired upon until a second puff arose, and the instrument section lurched and shuddered throughout its entire length.
There was a series of small explosions, all inside the jet and following one another at two-second intervals. There were flames as well, and one of them swept so close to Blakemore that it scorched the left side of his face before it swept across the controls with a hissing sound and expired.
There were no more flames and when the explosions stopped it was hard for Blakemore to believe for a moment that the astrojet had been seriously damaged, for it continued on in steady flight for a full minute.
During that minute he was far from idle. No instrument within reach of his hands was allowed to remain untested. He jerked and tugged at some, reversed others, set a dozen dials to spinning, plugged in connections and listened to sounds that he recognized and a few that were new to him.
It was the new sounds that alarmed him the most. His alarm increased when one of them became very harsh and grating, like the rasp of a rusty hinge on a massive door that was being battered by a hurricane.
A great many of the instruments, including two that were vital, went dead almost simultaneously. At least, he got that impression from the way they stopped functioning the instant he re-checked them in rapid sequence.
The astrojet began swiftly to lose altitude, though it did not descend vertically but in a wide horizontal curve that carried it in the direction of the sea wall as it sank lower.
Against the altitude loss could be balanced the likelihood that it would clear the wheat field before it crashed, or was ripped apart in the air by another explosion, which would probably be quite unlike the small ones that he had survived with no more than a scorched cheek and a feeling of near-desperation.
If it came down in the sea—he could no longer hope to bring it down by maneuvering it—he might still be able to get out and swim ashore, since it would not sink immediately. If it came down on the beach—well, even there his chances of surviving would be greater. A wide expanse of smooth sand would provide more emergency-landing space and lessen the impact of a crash.
He had no way of knowing what the outcome might be and his uncertainty had increased and was becoming unendurable when he looked down and saw that the sea wall was directly below him. He was passing over it at an altitude of less than two hundred feet.
The wall itself, with its dike-like inundation safeguards, and the beach beyond stood out in the sunlight with a startling clarity.
The beach was the opposite of barren. It was occupied by two men and a woman, and a wedge-shaped object at least seventy feet in length that looked not unlike an enormous dead skate cast up by the tide, its pinkish flesh shriveled by the blazing sunlight and mottled gray and black.
There were clotted masses of seaweed on the beach as well and for an instant the entire scene made Blakemore think of the shattered aquarium spilling its contents in the sun room. Just why he could not have said, for unlike the fishes the human figures were not flapping about in an element unnatural to them, and he did not really think that the wedge-shaped object was a skate.
But there was still something sea-strange about what he saw, as if some unexpected catastrophe had caused the beach to rise up out of the sea with an aura of unreality hovering about it.
Then, just before the astrojet came almost level with the sand and the sunlight became so dazzling he could no longer see, the answer came to him.
The figures on the beach looked unreal because they were close to naked and the men were robustly built, the tallest darkly bearded and waving what looked like a trident as he stared up at the sky. And not only was he a Neptune figure with his body gleaming with salt spray. The woman at his side bore a striking resemblance to Venus rising from the waves, for her dark hair had come unbound and was flowing down over her shoulders as the wind lashed at it. Her slender young body was also gleaming with spray from the crashing surf a few yards behind her. The other man—
The crackup was even worse than he had feared it might be. It was as if two crumbling temple walls in a grotto measureless to man had come together with a sea-echoing crash, blotting all awareness from his mind. Not all at once, but just slowly enough to make him feel that he was standing a little apart from the terrible grinding and splintering until it passed inside his head and brought about a total blackout.
CHAPTER THREE
Someone—or something—was tugging at Blakemore’s arm and whispering urgently to him, repeating the same words over and over.
“You’re not hurt badly—just stunned. Open your eyes, boy. Look at me. You’re going to be all right.”
His thinking was way out, he realized, with the buzzing that had come upon him when the darkness had lifted still making it difficult for him to do what the man wanted. It had to be a man, a “someone”—not just an object, a “something.” An inanimate object did not tug at you and speak with a deep, resonant voice.
The face he saw when he opened his eyes was so close to him that he could only bring it into focus by shutting them again and reopening them more slowly, blinking as he did so.
It was not a darkly bearded Neptune face. It was a much older face, heavily lined, the eyes deep set beneath a forehead that was both broad and unusually high. The fact that it was clean-shaven brought all of the lines into sharp relief and enabled him to identify it more quickly than he would otherwise have been able to do, for he had caught only the barest glimpse of it before the crash had—
No, no, he was making a mistake. It was a familiar face, long known to him. But now it looked different somehow.
In the photographs the lips had been less tightly compressed, the eyes less alive, less animated by the emotional intensity which men who like to think of themselves as emotionally detached care to display on the lecture platform, or when being interviewed by the press.
Philip Faran was nodding now with both warmth and reassurance in his eyes, as if he wanted Blakemore to know that, having opened his eyes, it would be a good idea for him to just about take his time in deciding how he felt.
Blakemore felt very good. There would have been no percentage in concealing it, for there almost had to be something seriously wrong with a man who could not rejoice after cheating death by the narrowest of margins.
“You know who I am, I guess,” Faran said, with a resigned shrug. “When people recognize a certified lunatic you can usually tell. Their startlement—not to say, alarm—is ten times as great as it would normally be if they just ran into an old friend tottering on a cane whom they had always thought of as only a few years beyond his first youth.”
How many years? Blakemore found himself wondering. How many exactly—since Faran had dropped out of sight?
“Eight years can make a man’s image dwindle more than you might expect,” Faran said, as if aware of Blakemore’s thoughts.
“Not if it’s a certain kind of image,” Blakemore heard himself replying. “You’re right about one thing, though. I started thinking of you as a friend when I was knee-high to a cricket. I just barely missed meeting you in person twice, and have always envied people who were luckier in that respect.”
“I’m afraid,” Faran said, “that hostility, not friendship became the dominant note with most of them. But thanks for trying.”
Blakemore raised himself a little more and looked around to make sure he was not inside a crumpled mass of wreckage. He wasn’t. He was lying stretched out on the sand with a firm support,
probably a boulder, at his back. Standing directly behind Faran, who was kneeling at his side, was the much younger, darkly bearded man he’d mistaken for Neptune armed with a trident and a girl whom Blakemore now saw was much too young and slim-waited to have assumed the role of even a Botticelli Venus, let alone a Rubens one. They were both wearing swim suits so body-clinging in texture that it was not surprising that they had seemed from the air to be totally naked.
The girl could not have been more than eighteen and the man looked only a little older, possibly in his early twenties. His beard was both long and forked, however, and combined with his tall stature and the trident it gave him a sea god aspect, despite the youthfulness of his features, and the fact that Neptune had taken part in the building of Troy was represented in classical mythology as seated in a chariot drawn by dolphins, and must have been almost as ancient as Jupiter his brother. Jupiter and Neptune-Jove and Poseidon to the Greeks. Greek and Roman tales of gods unaging! It seemed incredible that such thoughts could have come flooding into his mind at such a moment. The girl had sea-green eyes and there could be no question as to her great beauty. It almost had to mean that he was still so badly shaken up by the crash that a slight pinch of delirium could still distort his thinking and he did not want that to happen.
Blakemore shut his eyes, unwilling to accept what Faran had said about himself, although perhaps, in a cruel way, it cut close to the truth.
He did not think he could keep them closed for long, for Faran would certainly be tugging at his arm again in alarm before the waves that were descending on the beach could crash down more than ten or twelve times.
A famous musician had once murmured on his deathbed, “Ah, Shubert!” and expired, the tribute having come from him at an advanced age. A technological genius of Faran’s stature might not stand on quite the same heights as an immortal music maker or play upon the human lyre in an ecstatic enough way to evoke an “Ah, Faran” even from the young, who might die before becoming old, but could somehow never picture themselves as dying at any age.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 51