American Science Fiction

by Gary K. Wolfe

  But she did not seem to notice. She motioned to the left and made a sweeping motion with her hand and pointed toward the boulders.

  Go away, he said underneath his breath. Go away from here.

  And made rejection motions to indicate that she should go back, that this was no place for her.

  She shook her head and sprang away, in a running crouch, moving further to the left and up the slope.

  Enoch scrambled to his feet, lunging after her, and as he did the air behind him made a frying sound and there was the sharp bite of ozone in the air.

  He hit the ground, instinctively, and farther down the slope he saw a square yard of ground that boiled and steamed, with the ground cover swept away by a fierce heat and the very soil and rock turned into a simmering pudding.

  A laser, Enoch thought. The alien’s weapon was a laser, packing a terrific punch in a narrow beam of light.

  He gathered himself together and made a short rush up the hillside, throwing himself prone behind a twisted birch clump.

  The air made the frying sound again and there was an instant’s blast of heat and the ozone once again. Over on the reverse slope a patch of ground was steaming. Ash floated down and settled on Enoch’s arms. He flashed a quick glance upward and saw that the top half of the birch clump was gone, sheared off by the laser and reduced to ash. Tiny coils of smoke rose lazily from the severed stumps.

  No matter what it may have done, or failed to do, back there at the station, the alien now meant business. It knew that it was cornered and it was playing vicious.

  Enoch huddled against the ground and worried about Lucy. He hoped that she was safe. The little fool should have stayed out of it. This was no place for her. She shouldn’t even have been out in the woods at this time of day. She’d have old Hank out looking for her again, thinking she was kidnaped. He wondered what the hell had gotten into her.

  The dusk was deepening. Only the far peak of the treetops caught the last rays of the sun. A coolness came stealing up the ravine from the valley far below and there was a damp, lush smell that came out of the ground. From some hidden hollow a whippoorwill called out mournfully.

  Enoch darted out from behind the birch clump and rushed up the slope. He reached the fallen log he’d picked as a barricade and threw himself behind it. There was no sign of the alien and there was not another shot from the laser gun.

  Enoch studied the ground ahead. Two more rushes, one to that small pile of rock and the next to the edge of the boulder area itself, and he’d be on top of the hiding alien. And once he got there, he wondered, what was he to do.

  Go in and rout the alien out, of course.

  There was no plan that could be made, no tactics that could be laid out in advance. Once he got to the edge of the boulders, he must play it all by ear, taking advantage of any break that might present itself. He was at a disadvantage in that he must not kill the alien, but must capture it instead and drag it back, kicking and screaming, if need be, to the safety of the station.

  Perhaps, here in the open air, it could not use its stench defense as effectively as it had in the confines of the station, and that, he thought, might make it easier. He examined the clump of boulders from one edge to the other and there was nothing that might help him to locate the alien.

  Slowly he began to snake around, getting ready for the next rush up the slope, moving carefully so that no sound would betray him.

  Out of the tail of his eye he caught the moving shadow that came flowing up the slope. Swiftly he sat up, swinging the rifle. But before he could bring the muzzle round, the shadow was upon him, bearing him back, flat upon the ground, with one great splay-fingered hand clamped upon his mouth.

  “Ulysses!” Enoch gurgled, but the fearsome shape only hissed at him in a warning sound.

  Slowly the weight shifted off him and the hand slid from his mouth.

  Ulysses gestured toward the boulder pile and Enoch nodded.

  Ulysses crept closer and lowered his head toward Enoch’s. He whispered with his mouth inches from the Earthman’s ear: “The Talisman! He has the Talisman!”

  “The Talisman!” Enoch cried aloud, trying to strangle off the cry even as he made it, remembering that he should make no sound to let the watcher up above know where they might be.

  From the ridge above a loose stone rattled as it was dislodged and began to roll, bouncing down the slope. Enoch hunkered closer to the ground behind the fallen log.

  “Down!” he shouted to Ulysses. “Down! He has a gun.”

  But Ulysses’s hand gripped him by the shoulder.

  “Enoch!” he cried. “Enoch, look!”

  Enoch jerked himself erect and atop the pile of rock, dark against the skyline, were two grappling figures.

  “Lucy!” he shouted.

  For one of them was Lucy and the other was the alien.

  She sneaked up on him, he thought. That damn’ little fool, she sneaked up on him! While the alien had been distracted with watching the slope, she had slipped up close and then had tackled him. She had a club of some sort in her hand, an old dead branch, perhaps, and it was raised above her head, ready for a stroke, but the alien had a grip upon her arm and she could not strike.

  “Shoot,” said Ulysses, in a flat, dead voice.

  Enoch raised the rifle and had trouble with the sights because of the deepening darkness. And they were so close together! They were too close together.

  “Shoot!” yelled Ulysses.

  “I can’t,” sobbed Enoch. “It’s too dark to shoot.”

  “You have to shoot,” Ulysses said, his voice tense and hard. “You have to take the chance.”

  Enoch raised the rifle once again and the sights seemed clearer now and he knew the trouble was not so much the darkness as that shot which he had missed back there in the world of the honking thing that had strode its world on stilts. If he had missed then, he could as well miss now.

  The bead came to rest upon the head of the ratlike creature, and then the head bobbed away, but was bobbing back again.

  “Shoot!” Ulysses yelled.

  Enoch squeezed the trigger and the rifle coughed and up atop the rocks the creature stood for a second with only half a head and with tattered gouts of flesh flying briefly like dark insects zooming against the half-light of the western sky.

  Enoch dropped the gun and sprawled upon the earth, clawing his fingers into the thin and mossy soil, sick with the thought of what could have happened, weak with the thankfulness that it had not happened, that the years on that fantastic rifle range had at last paid off.

  How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny. For the rifle range had been a senseless thing, as senseless as a billiard table or a game of cards—designed for one thing only, to please the keeper of the station. And yet the hours he’d spent there had shaped toward this hour and end, to this single instant on this restricted slope of ground.

  The sickness drained away into the earth beneath him and a peace came stealing in upon him—the peace of trees and woodland soil and the first faint hush of nightfall. As if the sky and stars and very space itself had leaned close above him and was whispering his essential oneness with them. And it seemed for a moment that he had grasped the edge of some great truth and with this truth had come a comfort and a greatness he’d never known before.

  “Enoch,” Ulysses whispered. “Enoch, my brother . . .”

  There was something like a hidden sob in the alien’s voice and he had never, until this moment, called the Earthman brother.

  Enoch pulled himself to his knees and up on the pile of tumbled boulders was a soft and wondrous light, a soft and gentle light, as if a giant firefly had turned on its lamp and had not turned it off, but had left it burning.

  The light was moving down across the rocks toward them and he could see Lucy moving with the light
, as if she were walking toward them with a lantern in her hand.

  Ulysses’s hand reached out of the darkness and closed hard on Enoch’s arm.

  “Do you see?” he asked.

  “Yes, I see. What is . . .”

  “It is the Talisman,” Ulysses said, enraptured, his breath rasping in his throat. “And she is our new custodian. The one we’ve hunted through the years.”

  33

  YOU DID not become accustomed to it, Enoch told himself as they tramped up through the woods. There was not a moment you were not aware of it. It was something that you wanted to hug close against yourself and hold it there forever, and even when it was gone from you, you’d probably not forget it, ever.

  It was something that was past all description—a mother’s love, a father’s pride, the adoration of a sweetheart, the closeness of a comrade, it was all of these and more. It made the farthest distance near and turned the complex simple and it swept away all fear and sorrow, for all of there being a certain feeling of deep sorrow in it, as if one might feel that never in his lifetime would he know an instant like this, and that in another instant he would lose it and never would be able to hunt it out again. But that was not the way it was, for this ascendant instant kept going on and on.

  Lucy walked between them and she held the bag that contained the Talisman close against her breast, with her two arms clasped about it, and Enoch, looking at her, in the soft glow of its light, could not help but think of a little girl carrying her beloved pussy cat.

  “Never for a century,” said Ulysses, “perhaps for many centuries, perhaps never, has it glowed so well. I myself cannot remember when it was like this. It is wonderful, is it not?”

  “Yes,” said Enoch. “It is wonderful.”

  “Now we shall be one again,” Ulysses said. “Now we shall feel again. Now we shall be a people instead of many people.”

  “But the creature that had it . . .”

  “A clever one,” Ulysses said. “He was holding it for ransom.”

  “It had been stolen, then.”

  “We do not know all the circumstances,” Ulysses told him. “We will find out, of course.”

  They tramped on in silence through the woods and far in the east one could see, through the treetops, the first flush in the sky that foretold the rising moon.

  “There is something,” Enoch said.

  “Ask me,” said Ulysses.

  “How could that creature back there carry it and not feel—feel no part of it? For if he could have, he would not have stolen it.”

  “There is only one in many billions,” Ulysses said, “who can—how do you say it?—tune in on it, perhaps. To you and I it would be nothing. It would not respond to us. We could hold it in our hands forever and there would nothing happen. But let that one in many billions lay a finger on it and it becomes alive. There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity—I don’t know how to say it—that forms a bridge between this strange machine and the cosmic spiritual force. It is not the machine, itself, you understand, that reaches out and taps the spiritual force. It is the living creature’s mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us.”

  A machine, a mechanism, no more than a tool—technological brother to the hoe, the wrench, the hammer—and yet as far a cry from these as the human brain was from that first amino acid which had come into being on this planet when the Earth was very young. One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of thinking, for perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther. For each new development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so many other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road there were more paths to follow. There’d never be an end, he thought—no end to anything.

  They reached the edge of the field and headed up across it toward the station. From its upper edge came the sound of running feet.

  “Enoch!” a voice shouted out of the darkness. “Enoch, is that you?”

  Enoch recognized the voice.

  “Yes, Winslowe. What is wrong?”

  The mailman burst out of the darkness and stopped, panting with his running, at the edge of light.

  “Enoch, they are coming! A couple of carloads of them. But I put a crimp in them. Where the road turns off into your lane—that narrow place, you know. I dumped two pounds of roofing nails along the ruts. That’ll hold them for a while.”

  “Roofing nails?” Ulysses asked.

  “It’s a mob,” Enoch told him. “They are after me. The nails . . .”

  “Oh, I see,” Ulysses said. “The deflation of the tires.”

  Winslowe took a slow step closer, his gaze riveted on the glow of the shielded Talisman.

  “That’s Lucy Fisher, ain’t it?”

  “Of course it is,” said Enoch.

  “Her old man came roaring into town just a while ago and said she was gone again. Up until then everything had quieted down and it was all right. But old Hank, he got them stirred up again. So I went down to the hardware store and got them roofing nails and I beat them here.”

  “This mob?” Ulysses asked. “I don’t . . .”

  Winslowe interrupted him, gasping in his eagerness to tell all his information. “That ginseng man is up there, waiting at the house for you. He has a panel truck.”

  “That,” said Enoch, “would be Lewis with the Hazer’s body.”

  “He is some upset,” said Winslowe. “He said you were expecting him.”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Ulysses, “we shouldn’t just be standing here. It seems to my poor intellect that many things, indeed, may be coming to a crisis.”

  “Say,” the mailman yelled, “what is going on here? What is that thing Lucy has and who’s this fellow with you?”

  “Later,” Enoch told him. “I’ll tell you later. There’s no time to tell you now.”

  “But, Enoch, there’s the mob.”

  “I’ll deal with them,” said Enoch grimly, “when I have to deal with them. Right now there’s something more important.”

  They ran up the slope, the four of them, dodging through the waist-high clumps of weeds. Ahead of them the station reared dark and angular against the evening sky.

  “They’re down there at the turnoff,” Winslowe gasped, wheezing with his running. “That flash of light down the ridge. That was the headlights of a car.”

  They reached the edge of the yard and ran toward the house. The black bulk of the panel truck glimmered in the glow cast by the Talisman. A figure detached itself from the shadow of the truck and hurried out toward them.

  “Is that you, Wallace?”

  “Yes,” said Enoch. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t here.”

  “I was a bit upset,” said Lewis, “when I didn’t find you waiting.”

  “Something unforeseen,” said Enoch. “Something that must be taken care of.”

  “The body of the honored one?” Ulysses asked. “It is in the truck?”

  Lewis nodded. “I am happy that we can restore it.”

  “We’ll have to carry him down to the orchard,” Enoch said. “You can’t get a car in there.”

  “The other time,” Ulysses said, “you were the one who carried him.”

  Enoch nodded.

  “My friend,” the alien said, “I wonder if on this occasion I could be allowed the honor.”

  “Why, yes, of course,” said Enoch. “He would like it that way.”

  And the words came to his tongue, but he choked them back, for it would not have done to say them—the words of thanks for lifti
ng from him the necessity of complete recompense, for the gesture which released him from the utter letter of the law.

  At his elbow, Winslowe said: “They are coming. I can hear them down the road.”

  He was right.

  From down the road came the soft sound of footsteps padding in the dust, not hurrying, with no need to hurry, the insulting and deliberate treading of a monster so certain of its prey that it need not hurry.

  Enoch swung around and half lifted his rifle, training it toward the padding that came out of the dark.

  Behind him, Ulysses spoke softly: “Perhaps it would be most proper to bear him to the grave in the full glory and unshielded light of our restored Talisman.”

  “She can’t hear you,” Enoch said. “You must remember she is deaf. You will have to show her.”

  But even as he said it, a blaze leaped out that was blinding in its brightness.

  With a strangled cry Enoch half turned back to face the little group that stood beside the truck, and the bag that had enclosed the Talisman, he saw, lay at Lucy’s feet and she held the glowing brightness high and proudly so that it spread its light across the yard and the ancient house, and some of it as well spilled out into the field.

  There was a quietness. As if the entire world had caught its breath and stood attentive and in awe, waiting for a sound that did not come, that would never come but would always be expected.

  And with the quietness came an abiding sense of peace that seemed to seep into the very fiber of one’s being. It was no synthetic thing—not as if someone had invoked a peace and peace then was allowed to exist by sufferance. It was a present and an actual peace, the peace of mind that came with the calmness of a sunset after a long, hot day, or the sparkling, ghost-like shimmer of a springtime dawn. You felt it inside of you and all about you, and there was the feeling that it was not only here but that the peace extended on and out in all directions, to the farthest reaches of infinity, and that it had a depth which would enable it to endure until the final gasp of all eternity.

  Slowly, remembering, Enoch turned back to face the field and the men were there, at the edge of the light cast by the Talisman, a gray, huddled group, like a pack of chastened wolves that slunk at the faint periphery of a campfire’s light.