by Gene Wolfe
“Was he? I remember seeing in roundvid that his death was under investigation. Nothing more than that.”
“How did his father take it?”
“I have no idea.”
For a second I thought about that one; then I said, “I believe you saw him after his son’s death.”
“Yes, I did. We had business to transact, and we took care of it. Mr. Coldbrook didn’t talk about his personal affairs—not to me, at least.”
“Yet you said he had mentioned his son.”
“Once he said that his son was waiting for him out in the shop. He asked my assistant to tell him he was going to be engaged for an hour or more.”
“Was he?”
The boss shook his head. “I don’t recall.”
“I suppose you were haggling over the prices of various stones.”
“Possibly. As I said, I don’t recall.”
I sighed. “He sold you uncut emeralds.”
The boss said nothing.
“You gave him receipts. I’ve got some of them in my pocket. Would you like to see them?”
The boss said, “Are you from the government?”
“No. Did you know that Coldbrook had a daughter as well as a son?”
“Did he?”
“Yes, he did. We’re friends of hers. We’re acting for her.”
“Really?” The boss sat up straighter and pulled his chair closer to his desk. “I’m surprised she doesn’t act for herself.”
Georges said, “We’ll tell her that the next time we see her. Meanwhile, you’ll have to deal with us—if you want to deal at all.”
“You’re aware that this is a jewelry store. Are you also aware that my clerks and I are armed?”
“Hell, yes.” Georges was grinning.
I said, “We don’t want that kind of trouble, and I’m certain you don’t, either.”
The boss seemed not to have heard me; he glanced at Mahala. “Is this Conrad’s daughter?”
I said, “No, she’s my secretary.”
“Doesn’t she ever talk?”
Georges said, “No, she doesn’t. Maybe you could learn something from her.”
The boss spoke to me. “What do you want?”
I got out the smallest emerald. “What will you give us for that?”
There was a lot of haggling, and once we got as far as the front door; but in the end we agreed on prices for all seven. I put that first one back in my pocket and told the boss we would sell him the others but we were keeping that one. He did not like it, but after a bit of argument he went along. Then he got out a card and said he would have the money transferred to our account.
I put the rest of the stones away and told him we wanted cash.
“If I withdraw that much in cash, there’ll be someone investigating this transaction tomorrow. I wouldn’t want that. Would you?”
Georges asked, “How did you handle things with her father?”
“If you’ve read those receipts you claim to have, you will have seen that he never sold more than three stones at once. It was usually just one or two. I transferred my payment to two or three of his accounts. He had half a dozen that I knew of, and I split it up.”
There was a good deal of argument after that, but I will not give it here. In the end we had him write three checks on three accounts, a check for each of us. He and two of his clerks came with us when we went out to cash them, because we insisted on him and he insisted on the clerks. The three of them took the boss’s car, and the three of us went in Maxette. We went to three different banks, Georges and the boss going into the first bank and cashing Georges’s check, the boss and I going into the second, and Georges and Mahala going into the third with me, the boss, and his two clerks to cash hers. For the moment at least, Georges, Mahala, and I were rich.
All of this took quite a while. When we came out, it was getting dark. I handed over the stones, the boss gave me a receipt for them, and he and his clerks went back to their jewelry store. When they had gone, Georges asked, “What’s next?”
“Dinner and bed,” I told him, and at that time I honestly thought I meant it.
“Tomorrow?”
I had a couple of dozen vague ideas, but I said, “We’ll talk about that then.”
So that would have been that if I had not gotten up in the middle of the night. I was curious about the length of their days in the world behind the door, so I opened it. It was nice bright daylight in there, which of course woke me up.
The first thing I did was to go back into the mine and get the rifle. When I had carried it outside into the sunshine and most of the way down the path, I sat down on a stone and figured out what the various levers and buttons were for. One was to let you take the magazine out, which I did. It was a little rotary job you could not have replaced with a bigger box magazine unless you were a pretty good gunsmith and had a shop with all the right tools. It held five cartridges and was fully loaded, which did not surprise me a bit. There had been two cartridge boxes inside the mine. I had not looked, but my guess was that one was full and the other not.
The first me had not known a whole lot about hunting rifles, but he had known enough for me to recognize one when I saw one. Except for a couple of things, they had not changed a whole lot, and one way of looking at it was that both those things were really the same thing. The first was that some parts that would have been steel in the first me’s days were something else now. It was black, and it had to be a lot harder and tougher than any plastic we had back then. The trigger guard, the trigger, the cocking handle, and the bolt were all made of this new black stuff; so was the receiver. So were the cartridge cases, for that matter. The barrel was slender and a bit shorter than my arm, made of the black stuff with a thin liner of bright rifled steel. The stock was ponticwood, as near as I could tell, but I may have been wrong about that.
The second was that the rifle was not as heavy as it should have been. Not as light as a wooden mockup would have been, probably, but quite a bit lighter than I expected when I picked it up.
On the one hand, I wanted to shoot it at least once and maybe a couple of times. On the other, I would not be able to clean it. I had no bore cleaner, no cleaning rod, no oil, and no patches. Not even a rag. What decided it was that I knew darned well that it might not be easy to get more cartridges. Sure, I had a lot of money now, and money never hurts; but I might not be able to get any more, and I did not want to blow a wad on cartridges I might never need.
So no shooting.
After that, I went down to the beach and found the place where Georges, Mahala, and I had sat to talk. I sat there for maybe ten minutes or more looking out at the sea and thinking about what we had said and what I had not said.
Next I wanted to go looking for the place where the scarecrows (which was what Georges and I called them when we talked about them) had sat in a circle drumming on the ground. It was a really stupid thing to do, and I knew it; but I swore up and down that if I had any trouble finding it I would give up and go back.
Besides, I had already given in on firing the rifle, and it was time I won one.
Finding the right place was pretty easy, because I knew it had been out of sight of the sea and a piece of level ground with no trees and no bushes. It had not been far away, either—so even though it was not exactly a piece of cake, you could call it a sizable cookie with chocolate chips. No scarecrows there, awake or asleep, and if they had left anything behind, I did not find it.
After that, I went back to the beach and sat looking out to sea again. The rifle had some kind of an optical sight. I think there must have been a switch in the butt plate, too, because every time I put it to my shoulder the sight came on. That sight was always focused on whatever was in the middle of its field, projecting a green hoop on the image to show you where your shot was going to hit. At first I thought the wind could blow that green hoop around, which seemed crazy. Then I realized it was telling me where the bullet would hit for sure, including the correction
for wind speed and everything. So that was a very classy sight indeed.
If it had been my gun, I would have put a sling on it, but that is the only change I would have made. As it was, you could not sling it on your shoulder like I kept wanting to. You had to carry it. Like I said, it was not heavy, but it took one hand away, just the same.
When I was through playing with the sight, I decided to walk down the beach a ways to see how far it went. I wanted to take the rifle because I did not know what I might run into, and I wanted to leave Murder on Mars where it would be safe because I had been carrying it in my left hand. If I needed to fire the rifle, I was going to have to drop the book; and if it was gone when I tried to come back for it, I would have to stay here for the rest of my days.
I kept thinking about burying it in the sand. But if I did, I knew darned well it was going to take me a week to find it. Finally I realized the driftwood log I had been sitting on was hollow. I figured I would recognize it for sure, so I stuck the book in there as far as I could reach and took a good, long look at that log; then off I went, walking down the beach and turning to look back at the log every three or four steps.
Eventually I had gone so far I could not see it anymore, and there was nothing to do except keep walking until the beach ended. It was white sand (which maybe I have written about here before) and pretty coarse. For some reason I felt sure the water would get deep in a hurry if I waded out from the beach; it was probably the blue color of the waves that fooled me. Pretty soon I found that was dead wrong, and that I could have waded out for a country mile before the water got higher than my chin. I ought to have remembered sitting on the bank with Colette when all this began, and how blue the little stream we had splashed in had looked. Rivers that are not carrying a lot of mud and stuff out to sea, rivers of pure water, generally look blue like that.
The beach went on and on, wider here and narrower there; but I would glance at that little white sun (which was getting low now) every few minutes, and I could see that the beach kept curving around to the right. It made me surer than ever that this was an island—and not a real big one, either.
When my shadow was taller than I was, I decided I had better turn around and go back. That was when I saw a funny shape out to sea that stopped me dead; it looked like a big black rock, kind of rounded but bumpier and lumpier than most rocks.
And it was coming right at me.
It was not moving very fast, but as it got closer and closer I could see the little wave at the front where it was pushing through the water. I kept watching it and backing away from the place where it would come to land and telling myself I had the rifle now—which was right—and that I could run off into the jungle. Which was right, too.
Only I kept getting scareder and scareder just the same.
When there were at least three meters of it sticking up out of the water, I caught on that it was not really swimming like I had thought. It was walking on the bottom, and there could not be as much of it under the water as I was seeing above it. Something that waded on the bottom could probably walk on the beach, too; so I kept backing off and telling myself that it could not chase me if I ran between the big trees a little way inland. They were pretty close together, and it looked way too big to have gotten through.
All that was dumb as it turned out, but if you had been there you might have thought the same thing.
About then I saw something smaller and flatter but still pretty big out in front of it. It was there for sure, but every so often it disappeared under the water for half a minute and then came back. It was black, too, or maybe just dark gray. When whatever it was, was still about thirty meters out, the whole thing began to heave up out of the water. It must have been eight or ten meters across and five or six high, meaning two or three times as high as a tall man. And that was just the part that was above the water.
By then I was pretty sure it was an animal of some kind. I did not want to shoot it; for one thing the idea of killing something just for the fun of it always makes me want to hit somebody. For another I was not one darn bit sure that I could kill something as big as that with what was basically a deer rifle.
Back when people still killed elephants, there were a few who could kill an elephant with a deer rifle, and did; but those guys were dead shots, and they knew a heck of a lot about killing elephants. The first me had shot with a rifle some, but I had never actually done it myself. When it came to killing elephants—well, maybe you could tickle them to death.
The sky was getting pretty dim by the time the animal I had been watching heaved completely up out of the water. It was still lumpy bumpy, and it looked about the size of a small house. It also looked like it had no head at all, so I told myself that just because our animals on Earth had heads it was dumb for me to think that animals here needed them. That was not really all that dumb, but what I did next was; in fact, it was maybe the dumbest thing I have ever done in my whole life. I got a little closer so I could see it better.
When I did, all the lumps and bumps started moving. I would have watched them better if I had not been watching something else. The head was coming out, a flat stone-ugly head that only looked small because the rest of the animal was so big, but was really about the size of a washing machine. If it had eyes, I never saw them; but it had a beak sort of like a hawk’s or an eagle’s, and it was white on the inside—so white that it practically glowed in the dim light.
One of the lumps dropped off onto the sand. Then another and another. One that had been high up slid all the way down. By that time, those that had dropped off first were coming for me.
No, I did not shoot. I ran, and fast. Forget what I said about the trees being too close together; these things were small enough to go between them. So I ran, and once I ran into a tree, hard. I dropped my rifle and fell down, and it hurt like all hell and just about knocked me out. When I sat up, I scrambled around and found the rifle. By that time, one of the lumps was almost close enough to touch.
It opened its mouth, and that was what really let me see it. I had found the safety back when I was looking at buttons and levers, a sliding button where the stock curved down. When the trigger would not move, I remembered the button and shoved it forward fast, and that beak and white mouth were about ten centimeters in front of the muzzle when I fired.
Maybe the recoil was bad and maybe the noise was—I would not know. I only know I rolled to one side without dropping the rifle, and one of the little monster’s feet sort of brushed me. Then I was up and running again. I think it was the light gravity that saved me; on Earth I would have been meat.
For a while I could hear them coming after me, then everything got quiet. I kept running for another minute or two, then I slowed down, gasping for air. I trotted for a little bit, stumbling a lot, and after that I trotted out onto the beach and waited.
The way I figured it, I had two big advantages. One was the rifle and the other was that I could outrun them. There was more light out on the beach, so I would be able to shoot better. What was more, the beach was perfect for running. I would not bump into trees or find anything to trip over worse than a few sticks of driftwood. All right, maybe the beach was perfect for them, too. Or they could swim faster than they could run; but they were going to have to prove it to me.
So I got out onto the beach again and jogged along for quite a while, looking behind me a lot. Nothing seemed to be chasing me, so after a while I slowed down to a walk. I want to say a brisk walk, but the truth is that there was nothing brisk about it. Maybe I have told you how I used to run up and down the stairs and do exercises after the library closed. All right, when I was walking down that beach I felt like I had gotten enough exercise to last me for a week.
Pretty soon I realized I did not know where the heck I was. Had I gone past the place where we had talked? Well, maybe. Had I not gotten to it yet? I liked that one a whole lot better, but what if it was not true? What if I walked clear around the island looking for it, and stumbled right in
to mama snapping turtle or whatever she was, and all her dear little bumps and lumps?
Then the moon, or whatever you want to call it, came up. It looked even whiter than ours, and when it was still on the horizon it looked bigger than a cloud bank at sundown. Just seeing it got me wondering about it, and I finally decided that the reason for that bright white had to be ice. So their moon has enough gravity to hold on to quite a bit of water (this is what I decided) but it is too cold for that water to be liquid. It is ice, in other words, and that ice makes the moon look white—and bright, too. There probably is not a whole lot of air. Since the ice reflects heat and there is no air to warm, the ice stays frozen. All that may be wrong, but it seems to me that it explains what I saw up there.
Here in the library, one day when the library was closed and I had nothing to do, I quizzed one of our screens about temperatures on our own moon. The screen said it can get over 120 degrees in full sun. That sounds really hot until you find out that when the moon is dark it gets colder than 180 below zero. And oh my gosh! Guess what? There’s surface ice on our moon, too. Not much but some.
Naturally I did not know all that then, but it was the stuff I wondered about when I was staring up at that big bright moon, and I figure I might as well put it down here so you will know.
Finally I got so tired I sat down on a big piece of driftwood, naturally facing back the way I had come. I pulled off my shoes and socks and rubbed my feet, and thought of wading out a little way, and finally decided not to because I would have to stand up. You know. When I had put my shoes back on and had been sitting there for twenty minutes at least, mostly thinking about mama and her brood, and how much my cheek hurt, and how close I had come to dying, and how little I had liked it, all that got mixed up with thinking about the fire. By that I mean the one they burn you in when you are just about worn out or if you live on your shelf day after day and hardly ever get consulted or borrowed. I have never really been in it, but I know that it is in a special room in the basement. And I have seen it on a screen. I researched it, you know I did, and there was a neat little piece about it with some old worn-out guy getting burned. They had doped him so that he thought he was asleep, only he was really on this moving chain-belt. He was not tied down or anything because he was so out of it they had not had to tie him.