The Halfling and Other Stories

by Leigh Brackett

  “Sony,” he said nervously, “I’m blanked out. There’s some electrical disturbance, very strong….”

  Barrier glanced at the shadows. Creatures of force? They must be, since they were not solid matter. Electronic discharge from their bodies might well disrupt the small transmitter.

  He considered turning back. They were now about equidistant from the ship and the area of the possible ruins, and if the shadows had anything evil in mind, turning back could not stop them. The ship was well out of reach. Besides, he had his orders, and if these shadows were a native life-form, it was his duty to find out about them.

  They had made no hostile move as yet. Hostile or not, could shadows hurt men? And if so, how did you fight them?

  The ground mists were thickening. They must be approaching swampy ground, although he had not noticed any on Kendall’s films. Tenuous wreaths and veils hung in the blue glades, each separate droplet glittering with diamond fires in the filtered sunlight. The breeze rippled them to and fro very prettily. They were not fever mists. Barrier forgot them, returning his watchful attention to the shadows.

  Within the past few minutes they had drawn their circle in until they were only a few feet away from the men. They glided round and round, utterly silent, in a kind of nervous dance. The men were all watching them now. Hubbard spoke to Barrier, and his voice had an edge of fright.

  “What are they? What do they want?”

  “They’re only shadows,” said Barrier irritably. “What does it matter what they want?” Then he called out to the others, “Keep together. If things get rough we’ll turn back. But no matter what happens, don’t bolt. If you do, there won’t be any way to help you.”

  They went on, treading on each other’s heels staring around them. The shadows wove and bounded. Quite suddenly, Schmidt screamed. His gun went off with a snarling hiss. It flared again and again into a clot of darkness, which did not flinch.

  “It touched me,” Schmidt shuddered. “It touched me!”

  He began to run, not very far, because there was no space within the ring of shadows to run in. Barrier caught him by the arm.

  “Shut up,” he snarled. “Shut up!”

  Schmidt stood shivering. “It was cold. Cold as death.”

  “You’re not dead, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not hurt?”

  “I—No.”

  “Then shut up.” Barrier glared at Schmidt, at the others. “The next one of you that panics, I’ll knock him flat.”

  He was afraid himself. Miserably afraid. But he said, “They haven’t hurt us yet. Maybe they can’t. Anyway, let’s wait awhile before we blow our tops.”

  The young men swallowed and straightened their faces out into stiff lines and tried hard not to see the shadows. Schmidt twitched as he walked. Barrier wished there was a sound in the forest. A squeak, a grunt, a roar that meant something warm-blooded and alive. There wasn’t. Even their own footfalls were deadened on the soft ground.

  The mists thickened, sparkling, bright. The alien sun was blotted out. The shadows skulked and clung. Sweat poured down the cheeks of the men, stained their drill jackets. Hubbard said, licking his lips, “How much farther?”

  “Another mile or two.”

  Barrier wished the mists were not there. They made him feel shut in and suffocated. He worried about bogs. The blue daylight was maddening. He thought of the honest yellow glare of Sol and wondered what madness it was that sent men out to the ends of the galaxy seeking other suns.

  He stumbled suddenly, and looked down. At first he thought the obstacle was a rounded stone half buried in the mold of fallen petals. And then he knew it wasn’t. He stooped and lifted it up and held it out to Hubbard.

  “You wanted man,” he said.

  Hubbard rubbed his palms up and down along his thighs. He stared at the thing in Barrier’s hands, and the others stared over their shoulders, and the thing grinned at them with a single gaping line of teeth.

  Hubbard reached out and took it.

  “It’s very old,” he said. “As old as that.” He pointed to Gordon’s trophy.

  Schmidt said in a curiously shrill voice, “There were men here once, and animals. Now there aren’t any. They’re all dead, and I know what killed them.” He stared hard at tire shadows.

  Barrier swore. “That’s fine talk from a scientist. I thought you people were trained not to jump to conclusions.”

  Hubbard muttered, “Barrier is right.” He looked at the skull and repressed a shiver. “Come on, I want to see those ruins.” They went on, so close together that their shoulders rubbed. The mists grew denser and brighter and heavier. The men sweated, ignoring the shadows, desperately ignoring them.

  Without any warning, the shadows sprang,

  There was a moment’s terrible screaming from the men, and then there was silence, and after that a few stifled, horrid sounds. The skull fell from Hubbard’s grasp and rolled away, grinning a wise grin as it went. Barrier swayed where he stood, clawing blindly with his hands at his own flesh.

  He could see the others. Through a veil of shadowy gloom he could see them, dimly, and the gloom was behind his eyes and not before them. Some of the men had tried to run, and the shadows had caught them as they ran. Two of them kicked and groveled on the ground. Their outlines were indistinct, blurred over. Their eyes were crazy. So were Barrier’s.

  The shocking swiftness of that leap, the noiselessness, the awful cold that poured in suddenly upon the flesh—the loathsome sense of an intruder grasping at mind and body, taking them over from within….

  It was inside him. The shadow was inside him. Its icy substance interpenetrated his warm and living flesh; its alien and unreadable intelligence was clinging tight against his own, and it was shaking him, driving him, and he was going to die….

  They’re dead, all the men and animals, and I know what killed them—Schmidt was gone, plunging off into the mist, taking with him the terrible invader in his flesh. There were still shadows, a lot of them, running loose, for there had not been enough men. Some of these went after Schmidt.

  Barrier forgot his orders, his command, his pride. Blind black terror overwhelmed him and he ran. He wanted to outrun the thing that held him, to shake it free and lose it utterly, and go on running right off this filthy blue-lit world. But he couldn’t. It was part of him. He would not lose it till he died.

  He ran, through the silent forest, where the nodding blossoms were shrouded thick in mist and the flower-trunks were hidden, and there was nothing but himself and the nightmare that dwelt in his flesh, and a darkness in the air around him.

  Several times he fell, but something forced him up and on again. He had lost all track of the other men. He had almost forgotten them. Once, far off, he heard a shriek and knew that

  someone was dying, but he did not care. His mind was lost inside the shadow.

  He was only distantly aware that suddenly the mists were gone and he was staggering over ground that had once been cleared but now was overgrown, though not so thickly as the forest. He stumbled among stones, reeled and scrambled around great hummocks from which peeped shattered cornices, and crossed an open space where his feet brought forth a sound of dry sticks cracking. He looked down and saw that the sticks were human bones.

  He sobbed and turned his head to see the little group of shadows that hovered at his heels.

  “Are you waiting your turn?” he yelled at them, or tried to yell, and made only a hoarse whispering. His face, so strangely blurred and dimmed, twisted into an insensate mask of rage. He bent and picked up the old bare bones from around his feet and threw them at the shadows, and cursed, and sobbed, and then he ran again, five paces, ten, across the crackling open space, and there was a hummock too high to climb and too wide to go around. He butted himself against it, into a knee of stone that thrust out between the creepers, and then he fell. His body jerked convulsively, and was still….

  He was looking at a moon. It was a red moon,
small but very close. There were mountains on it, and gouged-out hollows. His mind made idle pictures of them, a face, a crouching rabbit. There were stars. He did not recognize them. Presently another moon came up, a larger one, and pallid green. He tired of making pictures on the moons.

  Someone was moaning, close at hand.

  Mildly curious, Barrier turned his head. He saw a man, lying curled up with his knees against his chest and his arms clasped over his head. He seemed to know the man. He studied the partly visible face. Of course he knew him, it was young Hubbard, who had been looking for men….

  Barrier sprang up. Cold sweat burst out of him and his body trembled, standing rigid in the moonlight. He searched inside himself as a man will search for a remembered pain, sick and praying not to find it.

  It was gone. The shadow was gone. He clutched at Hubbard, and saw that the unholy dimness had left his features. He shook Hubbard and shouted at him, and then he saw that there were other men huddled on the ground, two, three, four of them. He ran from one to the other, and they looked up at him with empty, frightened eyes. Schmidt was not among them, nor Morris.

  Six. Six living out of eight. And the shadows had gone away out of their flesh.

  For one short second he was hopeful. Then he looked out across the open space where the bones were and saw the company of dark and restless blots that moved among the spiky ribs and tumbled, careless limbs. He almost laughed that he had considered hope.

  He returned to Hubbard. “How did you get here?” he asked, and slapped the young man’s face until he answered.

  “ I don’t know. I—just ran.” Hubbard gave a racking shiver. “Oh God, Barrier, that thing inside me just like smoke blows through a bush, and cold….”

  Barrier slapped him again. “Where’re Schmidt and Morris?” “I don’t know.”

  Barrier set about getting the others on their feet. None of them knew precisely how they had gotten there. None of them knew what had happened to Morris, but Aiken said:

  “I saw Schmidt. I was running and I passed by Schmidt lying on the ground, at least I think it was Schmidt, it had his specimen case still strapped around it, and it was dead. Oh yes, there wasn’t any doubt at all about its being dead.”

  He turned away suddenly and tried hard to be sick.

  Barrier said slowly, “So they finished off two of us, and brought the rest of us here. I suppose they want to complete the job at their leisure. So here we are. We can’t communicate with the ship, and they won’t send Kendall out to look for us before morning. And if we’re still alive by then, and Kendall does happen to find us, and lands—what do you think they’ll do about it?”

  He glanced toward the shadows.

  Nobody answered.

  “I wonder,” said Barrier at last, “if fire would keep them off.”

  The others stared at him. Then they scurried about, gathering dead creepers, dry grass, anything that would bum. They made fires, a ring of them across the mouth of the cul-de-sac where they were caught. They waited, breathless with hope.

  The shadows crept up toward the flames. Then, as though delighted with them, they began to flit back and forth around the fires, frolicking over and through them, almost, it seemed, playing tag among the columns of smoke.

  Hubbard wept.

  Mist was crawling up out of the forest. The small red moon was sinking, and the larger pale green one shed a ghastly light. The fires burned low and the shadows danced around them.

  “They look real cute there, don’t they?” said Barrier viciously. “Having fun.”

  The flames died down, became beds of embers. Some of the shadows began to make tentative small rushes toward Barrier and the five who were left of his team.

  Caffrey whispered, “I guess they’re coming for us.” He still had a withered blossom stuck in his buttonhole.

  The shadows darted nervously, toward the men and then back to the glowing red embers. Beyond them tenuous arms of mist advanced and coiled between the ruins. They began to obscure the remaining moon, and as the light faded the shadows moved more swiftly, with a greater eagerness.

  Aiken had been rooting among the creepers that shrouded the hummock. Suddenly he bleated, “There’s a passage here, a doorway. Maybe we could get inside and—and barricade it.”

  “Against shadows?” said Barrier, and laughed.

  “It’s better than nothing.” Hubbard said. “Anything’s better than just sitting here.”

  He scrambled toward Aiken, who had disappeared, and the others followed. All at once, Barrier began to laugh. They stared at him, their faces round and startled. Barrier shouted at them, laughing.

  “You still don’t get it, do you? You still think you can run and hide, and put up little defences, and win out somehow in the end because you’re men and man always wins out. You haven’t learned yet, have you?”

  “Learned what?” asked Hubbard, in a low, queer voice.

  Barrier studied the shadows. “Why should I tell you, though? It took me half a lifetime and a lot of worlds to learn the truth. Why shouldn’t I keep it to myself, and let you die happy?”

  Abruptly, Hubbard sprang at him. He was like an enraged child, boiling with a confused fury of which the greater part was the fear of death. Barrier caught his wrists.

  “You dirty yellow-belly,” Hubbard squealed. “You’re supposed to be our leader, you’re supposed to show us what to do, and what do you do? You give up.” He called Barrier a number of evil names. “The great explorer, the big brave leader, hell! You’re just an old man with all the guts run out of you. You should have gone back to Earth and let somebody that could fight take over.”

  Barrier thrust him away, quite hard but without anger.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll let you in on it. Earth was a soft planet. Oh, she tried to put her foot down—ice ages, volcanoes, plagues, floods, droughts, and famines—but it was too late, and it wasn’t enough, and now we’ve got the upper hand of her. But the other worlds are tougher. Sooner or later, they find a way….

  “We aren’t welcome in the universe. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because we aren’t content to be the animals we are, but must always be pretending that we’re something else, prying about and upsetting things, grasping after stars, making trouble and screaming because it hurts. I don’t know. I only know that we’re hated. Everywhere I’ve been, wherever there was a man, they’d been gotten rid of somehow.”

  He glanced up at the alien stars, dimming now with the mist that rolled across them.

  “They hate us,” he said softly. “Their children hate us. Everywhere we have enemies, but never any friends.”

  Then he sighed. “You’re right, Hubbard. I am an old man, with the guts worn out of me. You run on in and hide, now, and I wish you luck. Me, I don’t like holes.”

  The shadows were hard upon him now. One brushed against him, and its touch was cold, cold as the bones that lay in the open space. Swiftly, so swiftly that none of the men could stop him, Barrier whirled and leaped through them, running like a deer.

  He took them by surprise, the small dark blots that hung so close to him. He got past them, trampling on the brittle bones. And then the shadows followed, spreading out fanwise behind him, and three or four racing on to catch him.

  He was some distance ahead of them. He heard Hubbard’s voice shrieking after him, but not the words it said. He put out every ounce of strength that was in him, rushing between the heaped-up ruins, into the arms of mist that reached along the ground.

  The shadows were closing in. But it was the mist that sprang.

  It rolled around and wrapped him in, and where it touched his flesh he knew that the glittering droplets were not drops of mist at all but tiny flecks of life, separate, sentient, gathered together in formidable colonies of cloud. And he knew two other things, in that second when it was too late for knowledge—that the mist had not touched him nor the others in the forest, and that it had moved into the ruined city after them, against the wind.
>
  Tiny flecks of life, glittering like powdered gems. And they hated man with a curious, inherited enmity.

  There was a numbing agony in Barrier, an ecstasy of curious anguish that made his body twitch and dance. His throat convulsed, but no sound came out of it, and his eyes were filled with motes of fire. He tried to run again, and could not, and somewhere far away in another world, Hubbard was still shouting.

  The shadows came. A broken thought went tumbling into the stricken emptiness of his mind—They work together, damn them, and they both hate man. Then there was the horrid cold, the alien presence sweeping through him, and this was death….

  The mists drew back. The tearing anguish left him, and the chill darkness that possessed him was somehow healing to his seared nerves. It was like being shocked with icy water, so that suddenly he could see and think again, even through the gloomy veil that dimmed his sight and mind.

  The shadows leaped and swirled around him, and where they leaped the mists that were not mists at all drew back, sullen and reluctant, but coiling all the same upon themselves. And the shadow-thing that was inside of Barrier made him turn and go back toward the ruins, not fast this time, but slowly because he had been hurt, giving Barrier, in some unfathomable way, of its own strength.

  The others came behind, a rear guard, dodging, weaving, pouncing on the stealthy tentacles of mist that sought to reach around them to the men who stood gaping by the great hummock. Here and there a glistening cloud engulfed a single shadow, and suddenly it was not.

  Barrier’s face, obscured by the dim aura, took on a strange expression.

  He sat down at Hubbard’s feet and the shadow left him, and they were as they had been before, the men, the shadows, the little beds of ash still glowing, and the wavering mist beyond.

  Hubbard swore meaningless oaths meant to conceal his shame. “Were you crazy, Barrier? Did you think you could draw them all away from us?”

  Aiken said, “He was trying to get away, to get a warning to the ship so maybe they could save us.” He bent over. “Barrier, listen. Barrier….”