Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  This part of the projection was uninteresting. He had seen the real thing so often that the repetition bored him. In response to his impatient voice, Oscar passed over this part quickly, and brought the projection back to normal pace when the crawler rounded the base of a huge dune and faced the slim metallic tower of the yacht.

  The violet flash of a blaster winked from the entrance port. The bolt streaked past the crawler and splashed into the sand, liquefying in instantly into glowing glass!

  And Laura’s voice shrieked at him from the dark oval of the entrance. “Don’t come any closer!”

  “Put that gun down, you old fool!” Bennett roared in answer. “What’s wrong with you? Have you gone crazy?”

  “Stay away. I don’t want to kill you, but I’ll do it if you come any closer!” There was hysteria in the high-pitched voice.

  “Put that blaster down!” Bennett repeated. “You kill me and you’ll be stranded here. You can’t fly that ship.”

  “I won’t have to. I’ve turned the subspace radio on SOS. Someone’ll hear me and come to help.”

  “That radio won’t reach anyone,” Bennett shouted. “All you’re doing is wasting power.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Have it your own way, but I’m not staying out here. I’m coming in!”

  Oscar was disgusted. A hysterical old woman, and a stubborn man. Fine company for a self-respecting robot. Laura obviously wasn’t thinking or she would realize that Bennett was right. Radio only had a range of about a dozen parsecs, and even subspace radio waves propagated only about two and a half times the speed of light.

  So even if there was something cruising within range, it would still take ten years for the message to get there, and as far as he could judge they were much more than a dozen parsecs away from anything familiar. A SOS was like whistling for water on this desert. It might bring it, but the chance was too remote for anything more than statistical significance.

  But there was no use in reasoning with a hysterical woman. And less use in reasoning with a stubborn man.

  The crawler came rushing toward the ship, and vanished behind a sheet of searing flame! The tough alloy of its shell didn’t melt, but the machine stopped. Bennett wasn’t driving any farther!

  “Idiot,” Laura said as she recharged the blaster. “He should have known I meant it.” She looked at her hands. They were quite steady. “I’d have given him supplies,” she muttered defensively. “I just didn’t want him on the same ship with me.”

  She looked out at the stalled crawler, obviously debating whether or not she should go out and inspect the results of her shot. The wind blew stronger, sending a few grains of sand rattling against the hull. She shook her head and turned back toward the interior. There’d be plenty of time tomorrow.

  The sun dropped below the horizon, and as it vanished, the heat of the day was abruptly transformed to the cool of evening. And into the coolness came the wind, rushing to fill the vacuum created by the shrinking air mass. In a matter of seconds, the whispering silence was broken, as a howling gale picked up masses of sand and hurled them at the ship!

  It was so sudden, so violent, that Laura turned deathly pale and the pounding beat of her suddenly racing heart tapped like tiny hammers in her temples. She fled up the shaft to her level, opened the door of her freshly sanitized cabin, and dropped on her couch, shaking with uncontrollable reaction.

  The wind had come too suddenly, a hammer blow that had smashed her taut nerves. With trembling fingers she switched on the cabin lights and turned on the recorder. She wanted sound—noise to drown out the whistling shriek of the wind outside!

  The red eye of the pilot light gleamed comfortably at her as the opening chords of the Nine Worlds Symphony crashed from the speakers. The sound filled the cabin, beating against the shriek of the wind and drowning it in a torrent of warmly human music. But only for a moment.

  Through the music, ripping in shrieking counterpoint to the thunder of the orchestration came the wind. The ship swayed as a howling shriek, amplified by the drumming plates of the hull echoed and reechoed through the ship in endless dissonance. Normality was gone, shattered beyond recall by that hellish blast of sound. Laura screamed, the raw note even louder than the howling din surrounding her. A sly look crept into her eyes. Here was the antidote. All she had to do was scream—and keep on screaming—and keep on screaming,—and—keep—on—.

  Laura looked vaguely around her. She was lying on the cabin floor. The fainting spell had been just overwrought nerves screaming for release in a body that had absorbed too much physical and mental punishment. She sat up unsteadily, shaking her head from side to side. Outside the din had abated to a steady whistle, and the ship didn’t shake nearly so much as it had done in the beginning. She smiled weakly. That had been a whing dinger of a hysterical attack. But that was all over now. Everything was settled and she was all right again.

  Stiffly she rose to her feet and made her way to the control room. The vision screen looked out on a scene of utter desolation. The sun must be up for it was light outside—a grayish yellow light obscured by tons of flying sand driven by a rushing wind.

  The implications weren’t lost on her. She was dead! Dead and buried! Entombed beneath millions of tons of sand!

  Oh, not now. Maybe not for another week or month. But in the end it was inevitable. For after all, dunes move, and the one beside the ship had moved perceptibly. Already the lower parts, the main drive and entrance ports were buried. The dune had moved inexorably forward to immobilize the ship. She was trapped!

  As she watched the wind died. It was as though some cosmic hand had shut off a giant blower. One moment the sand was rushing through the air, the next it was falling out of Aurum’s brazen sky as the sun climbed toward the zenith.

  She shrugged. Well, that was that. She could lose without whining. She moved to rise from the pilot’s chair where she was sitting, and a heavy hand pressed her down again. She couldn’t see who it was, but those long muscular fingers with the coarse hairs on their backs could belong to only one man on this world—George Bennett!

  “Don’t move, Mrs. Latham.”

  Bennett’s cold admonition had absolutely no meaning. She couldn’t have moved if her life depended on it. He circled the chair. His shirt was off and the pinkish, faintly rippling flesh that covered the left side of his chest marked where the splash of her shot had struck. The flesh was already well on the way to regenerating, and the sight was sickening. His cold eyes inspected her impersonally. There was no anger in them, just a curious remote quality that drove the blood from her face and left her weak and shaking. She had seen that look before.

  “Two inches to the right, and I’d still be out there,” he said bleakly. “It wasn’t a bad shot for a woman.”

  She stared at him, numb with terror.

  “You should have checked to make sure,” he said. “Or at least you should have closed the entrance port.” He sat gingerly in the copilot’s chair, eyeing her with a puzzled look on his face. “But what I can’t understand is why you shot me in the first place.”

  “I was afraid of you,” she said dully. “You’d lost your conditioning.”

  He eyed her coldly, waiting.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with bitter honesty. “I don’t go for killing, but there’s no sense giving you another chance.”

  “I wouldn’t take it if I had it!” she said shakily. “Last night was enough for a lifetime. I don’t think I could go through that again.”

  “You had quite a party.”

  “You knew?”

  “I was outside your door. I was going to kill you before you started screaming, but I changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “I need you. With this bad side, I won’t be worth a darn for a week or so, and a week of those sandstorms is going to bury this crate. I need your muscles.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Wo
rk. Clean the useful gear out of this ship and help transport it over to the mesa. There’s shelter there.”

  “How? The sandstorm must have buried the crawler.”

  “I doubt it. I put it on automatic when I came in. It’s probably circling around outside. The sand can’t hurt it, but it would have been buried if I had left it motionless. Now let’s get moving. We’ll start with the food stores first, and don’t get any foolish ideas. I’d just as soon burn you as not.”

  LAURA SLUMPED BESIDE the last crate to be moved. Her body was a living ache of strained muscles and sore joints. It had been killing work to unload everything that Bennett thought he might need, and to lower the gear through the emergency exit to the ground below. Bennett looked down from the hatch at the mound of stores and equipment on the ground. “All right,” he called out. “Get that box out. We can’t wait all day.” Laura groaned and moved. She was going to feel this day for the rest of her life.

  “The crawler isn’t going to hold all that stuff and us too. You’ll have to walk.”

  “Walk! After all this!”

  “You can stay here,” he answered grimly. “I don’t need you now.”

  “I’ll walk,” she said.

  Bennett grinned. “Now that’s what I call being reasonable.”

  She looked at him dully. “Who cares?”

  “I don’t. But I’m glad to see that you’ve gotten some sense. Now if the trip across the desert doesn’t kill you, you’ll be comfortable enough. There’s enough room on that mesa for us to never see each other.”

  “You’d like me to die, wouldn’t you?”

  “I can’t say that it’d cause me any great pain,” he admitted. “But still, your company might be preferable to none. I don’t know. Anyway, we’ll find out if you survive.”

  “I’ll survive,” she promised him grimly.

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “But before you go I want you to put on one of the suit liners.” He meant the space suit liners—skin tight garments of duralon that fitted closely around wrist and ankles with elastic cuffs. The liner was pocketless and fitted its wearer like a second skin.

  “Why that?”

  “First, it’s protection of sorts. Second, you won’t be able to hide anything under it.”

  “Cautious lad, aren’t you. In that thing I can’t even hide myself. It’s next door to being stark naked. I’m damned if I will.”

  “It’s your funeral,” he said as he swung one leg over the hatch. “But don’t try to follow me unless you have that liner on. I’m warning you.” She shrugged. “All right. But I’m going to remember this.”

  “I don’t particularly care whether you do or not.”

  Oscar thought that this was a fine way to start a long companionship. Between his attitude and hers there was bound to be—the protection ended suddenly in the middle of Oscar’s train of thought.

  “You turned me off then,” Oscar said. “That was inhuman. Turning off my power was just the same as killing me.”

  “I had to do it,” Bennett said. “I didn’t know how long we’d be gone and there was no sense letting you waste power.”

  He shook his head. Well, he knew enough of his past now, and it wasn’t too different from what he had deduced. However, Laura certainly wasn’t what he thought she’d be. A homicidal neurotic was the last thing he’d have suspected. Quietly he left the control room, ignoring Oscar’s protesting squawk that there were still more questions.

  X

  BENNETT ENERGIZED THE antigravity plate on which he had ridden to the bottom of the shaft and rose to the surface of the dune. He entered the crawler and drove slowly back to the mesa where Laura was waiting. How much should he tell her? If he knew her, she’d demand it all, but was he capable of giving it? He’d better let Oscar do it. He realized that the cold facts which the robot would present without emotion would hardly be likely to ease the blow. But it wouldn’t be much better if he did it himself. It was a case of being damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. He sighed and shook his head.

  Laura was waiting for him. “Well,” she asked. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

  “I did, and I didn’t.”

  “What kind of answer is that? What’s wrong with you? You’re looking strange.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Was it that bad?”

  “It wasn’t good.”

  “Did you learn how to fly that ship?”

  “Yes. That wasn’t hard. I still have the old skills, but I just didn’t have the knowledge. About three weeks preflight and I should be able to handle her all right.”

  “Well, what on earth makes you look as though someone hit you over the head.”

  “You.”

  She stood up and faced him. “Now, look, George. I can’t stand any more of this. Either you tell me what happened down there, or I’ll go and find out for myself.”

  He watched her walk across the room with quick impatient steps. He looked at her doubtfully. She was watching him with that familiar speculative look—the look that said in effect that he was going to do what she wanted in the end, so he might as well do it now. Well, he’d tell her, but she wouldn’t like it . . .

  Laura looked at him when he had finished. He had been as tactful as he could, but more than once he felt her body stiffen under his hands. But toward the end she had relaxed, even when he told her of the last day aboard the ship.

  “She was pretty awful, wasn’t she?” Laura asked when he had finished.

  “She?”

  “Why, Laura Latham, of course. She didn’t have very much to live for, did she? It’s a good thing that she’s dead!”

  “Dead?”

  “Certainly. In fact, she never happened—not to me at any rate. She’s a future I have no part in nor want any part of.”

  “But my darling. You’re Laura Latham!”

  “I’m not. I couldn’t be. She was something that simply can’t happen now. Don’t you see, I’ve nothing in common with her. I never met John Latham. I never married him. I’m twenty-two years old.”

  He laughed! Subjective to the end! That was a woman for you. She didn’t want to know about Laura Latham to find out what she had been, but to find out what she might become! And having learned, she dismissed it as something which simply couldn’t exist. Perhaps that was the best way to treat it. After all they both had a new start, were taking a second chance with life—and certainly their lives would be different than they had been before.

  Laura was still talking. “Aurum she called it. The Golden World. It isn’t a bad name. I think I like it. It showed that she hadn’t lost all love of beauty. There was still something good in her.”

  The dreaminess left Laura’s face and her voice hardened. “But anyway, that doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned, she never existed.”

  “Tell that to the immigration lads when I bring you back to Earth and see how far you get,” Bennett said. “Your retinal pattern and fingerprints still say you’re Laura Latham. You’re still the owner of Spaceways and one of the richest women in the Confederation—whatever else you may think you are.”

  “Then I won’t go back. I won’t play a part, live a lie. Do you understand? I will not—”

  “But you must. I can’t leave you here alone.”

  “Stay here with me then.”

  “We’ve gone over this ground before,” Bennett said impatiently. “We can’t leave a source of knowledge like this untapped. Civilization needs it.”

  “I’m not interested in Civilization.”

  “That’s not true. You can’t help but be interested. You’re a part of it—and your good fortune isn’t yours alone. It belongs to others as well. Let’s face it. When you came here you were a pretty sad specimen, if Oscar’s telling the truth and I’m quite sure he is. Now you’re pretty wonderful. Would you deny others the right to a second chance?”


  “No, but if it means that I’ll have to leave this place permanently and become someone I loathe, I’m not going to do it. I don’t want power now—at least not that kind. I’m happy here, and I’d just as soon stay that way.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to stay away. But there is going to have to be some sort of machinery set up to make this world available to deserving people in the Confederation. Surely you must realize that. With the money and power you possess back on earth, the process can be speeded up appreciably.”

  “But George, I can’t do it. I just can’t. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t. If I’m as rich as you claim, I’d be pretty well known, and I simply can’t come back looking like a debutante. I’d be a world-wide sensation. And you know what would happen then. People would start asking questions about where I got the rejuvenation, and there’d be all sorts of trouble. By the time it was over, Aurum would be public property with a couple of hundred billion people clamoring to come here. Every world in Civilization would claim this place. We’d have no right at all and our lovely world would be ruined by people who wanted nothing from it but the secret of how to live indefinitely. We’re increasing in numbers fast enough now, but if we were all immortal there would be the devil to pay. Civilization isn’t ready for that yet.”

  Bennett started. He hadn’t thought of that. Living constantly as a young man, he had forgotten what growing old was like. But it was obvious enough that people grew old—and that they probably hated it. She was right. If word got around that someone had found a way to defeat old age, everyone would be after it. It would be worse than the Uranium strike on Halsey that nearly broke the Confederation wide open.

  And neither of them would be able to keep the secret. Powerful as Spaceways was, it was not as powerful as the Confederation, and every politician in the Fifty Worlds would be hot on the trail in behalf of themselves and their constituents.

  No, he couldn’t publicize Aurum. Its benefits would have to be conferred secretly on those who could use them intelligently. There would have to be some sort of screening, and the technology here would have to be released slowly, over enough time for Civilization to absorb its impact. In time perhaps even immortality could be given to everyone. But Laura had proposed problems he had never considered—and they were real.