All sounds were suddenly stilled, all shouting stopped, all noises died away.
Around the bow of the ship Hal Sarkoff came running. He saw the group and looked bewildered. “Hey! How did you guys get here?”
“Blast him!” Nielson said, centering his pistol on this new target.
From the staff in Thulon’s hand came a soft tinkle, a bell-like sound. Nothing seemed to happen but Nielson staggered as if he had been hit a sharp blow. The pistol flew out of his hand and landed twenty feet away.
* * * *
“Listen, you apes,” Sarkoff shouted at the top of his voice. “I’m Hal Sarkoff. I’ve always been Hal Sarkoff. I’ll never be anybody else but Hal Sarkoff. Do you get it?”
They didn’t get it.
“If you—” Nielson whispered. “If you are really Sarkoff, then who—what—is he?” He pointed toward Thulon still standing in the lock.
“Him?” The grin on the craggy face belonged to Hal Sarkoff and to no one else. “Meet a god,” he said.
“A god?” That was Usher speaking now, his voice a tense whisper.
Sarkoff continued grinning. “Well, he resurrected me when I was deader than hell. I guess that makes him a god.”
“You—you know you were dead?”
“Yep. At least I guess I know it. The last thing I remember is trying to get back to the control panel when we got that hole knocked in the ship, so I could cut the drivers back in. After that everything gets kind of hazy. The next thing I remember is my pal here,” he gestured toward Thulon, “and a lot of his buddies chirping like sparrows while they worked over me. And believe me, they were working me over plenty. I felt like I had been turned inside out, wrung out, hung out to dry, then stuffed all over again.”
“But when you came back to the ship,” Hargraves spoke, “you said you remembered everything that had happened, the crash of the ship, our hiding her. If you were dead, how did you learn these things?”
“He told me,” Sarkoff answered, nodding toward Thulon. “He filled out my memory for me with dope he had taken from your mind while you were talking. Reading minds is one of that old boy’s minor accomplishments.”
“Then why didn’t you tell us the truth?” Hargraves exploded. “You said you had been sent out scouting. Why didn’t you tell us what had really happened?” Mentally he added, “If it happened!”
“Because you apes wouldn’t have believed me!” Sarkoff answered. “To your knowledge—mine, too, until it happened—dead men don’t get up out of their graves and walk. If I had told you the truth, you wouldn’t have believed a word of it. If I told you something you knew wasn’t true, that you had sent me out on a scouting trip, you would know I was lying, you would figure it was a trick of some kind, and you would wait around and try to discover the trick. While you were waiting around trying to catch me, I could get in some missionary work on Ron Val. I knew I could convert him, if I had a chance to talk to him. With him on my side, we could convince the rest of you. It would have worked too. All it needed was a little time for you boys to get used to the idea of a dead man coming back to life.” He looked at Nielson. “Remind me to black that other eye of yours one of these days.”
“What?” said Hargraves. “What’s this?”
“Our pal Nielson,” Sarkoff said. “If you think before you act, he acts before he thinks. You had no sooner gone chasing off to see if I was really where you had buried me, which was what I thought you would do, until Nielson comes poking into where Ron Val and I were holding a conference. Nielson had a gun. He had it out ready to use. He figured the only safe thing to do was to shoot me. So,” Sarkoff shrugged, “I had to smack him. He had forced my hand.”
There was a slight stir among the group. This was news to all of them.
“Is this true?” Hargraves said.
“Yes,” said Nielson defiantly. “And I was right. I should have killed him. He isn’t Hal Sarkoff. He isn’t telling the truth about coming back to life. Sarkoff is dead.”
* * * *
Sarkoff glanced up at Thulon who was still standing in the lock looking down at the men before him. There was a ghost of a smile on his face.
“See!” said Sarkoff, addressing Thulon. “I told you we couldn’t tell these boys anything. They have to see, they have to feel, they have to be shown.”
“Well,” the thought came from Thulon to everyone. “Why don’t you show them?”
“Okay,” Sarkoff answered. “Nevins!” he shouted. “Reese! Come out of that ship.”
Nevins and Reese were the two engineers who had died with Sarkoff.
Thulon moved a little to one side. Nevins and Reese came out of the ship. They were grinning.
“Feel us!” Sarkoff shouted. “Pinch us. Cut off a slice of skin and examine it under a microscope. Make blood tests. Use X-rays. Do whatever you damned please.” He shoved a brawny arm under Nielson’s nose. “Here. Pinch this and see if you think it’s real.”
Nielson shrank away.
Nevins and Reese passed among the men, offering themselves in evidence. Startled voices called softly in answer to other startled voices. “They’re real.”
“This is no lie. This is the truth.”
“I’ve known this man for years. This is Eddie Nevins.”
“And this is Sam Reese.”
Hargraves heard the voices, saw the conclusion they were reaching.
“One moment,” he said.
The voices went into silence. Eyes turned questioningly to him.
“Even if these men are really Hal Sarkoff and Eddie Nevins and Sam Reese, if they are the companions we knew as dead who have miraculously been returned to us, there are still facts that do not fit into a logical pattern. Even here on this world the laws of logic must hold true.”
Silence fell. Men looked at him and at each other. Where there had been wonder on their faces, new doubts were appearing.
“What facts, Jed?” Sarkoff questioned.
“The sphere that attacked us, that attempted to destroy us, without warning. This is a fact that does not fit.”
“The sphere?” Uncertainty showed on Sarkoff’s face. Then he grinned again and turned to Thulon. “You tell him about that sphere.”
“Gladly,” Thulon’s thoughts came. “As you know, Vega has two planets. Long ago we were at war with the inhabitants of this other planet. Part of our defenses around our own planet were floating fortresses. The war is done but we have left guards in the sky to protect us if we are attacked. The sphere that attacked you was one of our automatic forts which we had left in the sky.”
“Ah!” said Hargraves. The cold logic of his mind sought a pattern that would include fortresses in the sky. Presuming war between two planets, such fortresses were logical. But—
“The construction of such a sphere indicates vast technical knowledge, tremendous workshops. I have seen no laboratories and no industrial centers that could produce such a fortress. I have, moreover, seen no civilization that will serve as a background for such construction.”
* * * *
He waited for an answer. Usher, the archeologist, looked suddenly at him, then looked at Thulon.
“The fortresses were built long ago,” Thulon said. “In those past milleniums we had industrial centers. We no longer need them and we no longer have them.”
“Then there is another stage!” the archeologist gasped. “You are past the city stage in your evolutionary process. You are beyond the metal age. What—” Usher eagerly asked. “What comes after that?”
“We are beyond the age of cities,” Thulon answered. “The next but possibly not final stage is a return to nature. We live in the groves and the fields, beside the lakes, under the trees. We need no protection from the elements because we are in unison with them. There are no enemies on this world, no dangers, almost no death. In your thinking you can only de
scribe us as gods. Our activities are almost entirely mental. Our only concession of materialism is this.” He lifted the staff. “When you fired at me, this staff canceled your beams. It would have canceled them if they had been a thousand times stronger. When one of you attempted to destroy Sarkoff, force went out from this staff, knocking the weapon from his hand. There are certain powers leashed within this staff, certain arrangements of crystals that are very nearly ultimate matter. Through this staff my will is worked. Some day,” he smiled, “we will even be able to discard the staff. That is the goal of our evolution.”
The thoughts went into soft silence and Thulon looked down at them. “Does that satisfy you?” His eyes went among the group, came to rest on Hargraves. “No, I see it does not. There is still one fact that you cannot fit into your pattern.”
“Yes,” said Hargraves. “If all that you have told us is true, why was the ship stolen?”
“Everything has to fit for you?” Sarkoff answered. “Well, that’s why you are our leader. I can answer this question. I took the ship so I could have it repaired. Then, when I brought it back to you, fit to fly again, all of us would have evidence that we could not deny. You might doubt my identity, you might doubt me, but you would not doubt a ship that had been repaired. Thulon,” Sarkoff ended, “will you do your stuff?”
* * * *
Standing a little apart from the rest Hargraves watched. Thulon and his comrades brought metal from the vessel. How they used the tripod he could not see but in some way they seemed to use it to melt the metal. This was magna steel. They worked it as if it were pure tin. It didn’t seem to be hot but they spread sheets of it over the gaping hole in the hull. They closed the hole. He knew the ship had been repaired but still he did not move. On the ground before him was something that looked like an ant hill. He watched this, his mind reaching out and grasping a bigger problem. The ants, he could see, were swarming.
Nielson detached himself from the group at the ship and came to him.
“Jed,” he said hesitatingly.
“What?”
“Jed, what Hal said about me attacking him was right. I thought—I thought he wasn’t Sarkoff. I thought I was doing what was right.”
“I don’t doubt you,” Hargraves answered. His mind was not on what Nielson was saying.
“Jed.”
“Uh?”
“Jed. I—”
“What is it?”
“Jed, will you take over command again?” The words came fast. “I—”
“Huh? Take over command? Don’t you like the job?”
Nielson shivered. “No. I’m not ready for it yet. Jed, will you take it over, please?”
“Huh? Oh, sure, if that is what the fellows want.”
“They want it. So do I.”
“Okay then.” Hargraves was scarcely aware that Nielson had left. Nor did he notice Ron Val approaching.
“Jed.”
“Huh?”
“Jed, I’ve been talking to Thulon.” The astro-navigator’s voice was trembling with excitement. “Jed, do you know that Thulon and his people belong to our race?”
“What?” the startled captain gasped. “Oh, damn it, Ron Val, you’re dreaming again.”
* * * *
It would be a wonderful dream come true, Hargraves knew, if it was true. The human race had kin folks in the universe! Man did not stand alone. There was something breath-taking in the very thought of it.
“Thulon says the tests he ran on Hal Sarkoff proved it. He says his people sent out exploring expeditions long ago, just like we are doing, only the groups they sent out were more colonists than explorers. He says one of these groups landed on earth and that we are the descendants of that group, sons of colonists come back to the mother world after uncounted centuries of absence—”
Ron Val was babbling, the words were tumbling over each other on his lips.
“Oh, hell, Ron Val, it doesn’t fit,” Jed Hargraves said. “We can trace our evolutionary chain back to the fish in the seas—”
“Sure,” Ron Val interrupted. “But we don’t know that those fish came from the seas of earth!”
“Huh?” Hargraves gasped. “Well, I’ll be damned! I never thought of that possibility.” He looked at the lakes dancing in the Vegan sunshine. From these lakes, from these seas, had come the original fish-like creature that eventually became human in form! The thought was startling.
“The colonists landed on earth thousands of years ago,” Ron Val said. “Maybe they smashed their ship in landing, had to learn to live off the country. Maybe they forgot who they were, in time. Jed, we have legends that we are the children of God. Maybe—Oh, Jed, Thulon says it’s true.”
Hargraves hesitated, torn between doubt and longing. He looked down. On the ground in front of him the ants were still swarming. Hundreds of them were coming from the ant hill and were flying off. There were thousands of them. Eventually, in the recesses of this vast grove, there would be new colonies, which would swarm in their turn. He watched them flying away. The air was bright with the glint of their wings.
He looked up. Thulon was coming toward them. Thulon was smiling. “Welcome home,” his voice whispered in their minds. “Welcome home.”
Hargraves began to smile.
1Originally devised as a protection against meteors, it was a field of force that would disintegrate any solid particle that struck it, always presuming it did not tangle with an asteroid or a meteor too big for it to handle. A blood brother of the negatron, it made space flight, if not a first-class insurance risk, at least fairly safe.—Editor
THE NEXT TIME WE DIE
Amazing Stories, February 1957.
Now in the nooning, with the sun high overhead and the shadows huddling dispiritedly at their sides, the threat that existed in this wild desert was completely invisible.
The girl, Nora Martin, said, “What I don’t understand is why we were so stupid as to come here in the first place. We could have stayed on Earth and had homes and families.” Becoming conscious of what she had said, she hastily corrected herself. “I mean, each of us could have had a home and a family.”
Pike McLean shifted the muzzle of the Rangeley just a trifle, adjusting it so that the cross hairs in the periscope sight covered the exact spot where he expected, and hoped, the next native would appear. He tried to dig the sand out of his eyes. Since he had sand on his hands, this only got more of the gritty particles into his eyes. He wished fervidly for a deep 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 the skies 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 were unshed tears.
“Did you hear what I said?” she repeated.
McLean shifted his long body so that it lay a little lower in the depression in the sand. “I guess you came here because you’re an archeologist and you’re getting paid to examine ruins. I came here because 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 offending grain 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 really get 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 our gills behind us, that’s a long time. We’ve been dying ever since, that’s for sure. And probably for a much longer time.”
“I thought you were talking about reincarnation,” the astonished archeologist said.
“So I was,” the roustabout answered. “The
y’re only different approaches and aspects of the same problem. We reincarnate in order to take another crack at the puzzle of evolution. Some day we’ll solve it! Then we will fall heir to the farther stars instead of just this little old duck pond of a solar system.”
“You sound very sure of yourself. What proof—”
“It’s in the book,” McLean answered. “We’re homo sapiens. And that means something. The mud flats didn’t stop us. We crawled off of them and on to the high ground and into the forests and overran a planet. The atom bomb didn’t hold us up too long, even when we got to using it on each other. Where in all that space—” His hand swept upward in an arc that included all the vast expanse of stars dimly seen here on this world even at high noon. “—is anything that can stop us, when we can keep coming back to take another crack at the problem? Any problem, I don’t care what it is, can be solved if we can keep working at it long enough!” Enthusiasm sounded in his voice, then faded out. He drew his hand down. Two of the fingers were missing.
McLean stared at the ooze of blood and plasma and set his lips against the 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 from her back, she opened it. Taking great care not to get her head above the edge of the hole, she opened the first-aid kit and applied antiseptics and bandages to the stumps of the two fingers. Alternately she scolded and then soothed him.
“You do that real well,” he said, approvingly. “You should have been a mama, instead of an archeologist, and raised a whole slather of kids, so you 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 a profession.” The longing was washed away in a film of sudden tears.
* * * *
McLean closed his lips even tighter. He applied one eye to the sight of the Rangeley, now adjusted to function as a periscope. Level and apparently free of all danger, the grim red sands swept away to the low mountains in the distance. The air was so clear and so thin that he could even see the ruins of the city that had been their destination when they had left the ship. The city was a vast mass of tumbled masonry sprawled on treeless, forgotten hills. On the sand nothing moved. Yet death was there in front of him, and his eye had certainly passed over it.
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