The Second IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 6

  Shepley shook his head vigorously. “Believe me, Doctor, I know now why the time-wardens are here. As long as there’s a chance of their being resurrected were committing murder every time we rob a tomb. Even if it’s only one chance in a million it may be all they themselves bargained on. After all, one doesn’t commit suicide because the chances of life existing anywhere are virtually nil.”

  Already he had come to believe that the enchantress might suddenly resurrect herself, step down from the catafalque before his eyes. While a slender possibility existed on her returning to life he felt that he too had a valid foothold in existence, that there was a small element of certainty in what had previously seemed a random and utterly meaningless universe.

  IV

  As the first dawn light probed through the casements, Shepley turned reluctantly from the nave. He looked back briefly at the glowing persona, suppressing the slight pang of disappointment that the expected metamorphosis had not yet occurred, but relieved to have spent as much time awaiting it as possible.

  He made his way down to the old cantonment, steering carefully through the shadows. As he reached the mono-rail—he now made the journey on foot, to prevent Traxel guessing that the cache lay along the route of the rail—he heard the track hum faintly in the cool air. He jumped back behind a low mound, tracing its winding pathway through the dunes.

  Suddenly an engine throbbed out behind him, and Traxel’s camouflaged half-track appeared over the edge of the ridge. Its front four wheels raced and spun, and the huge vehicle tipped forward and plunged down the incline among the buried tombs, its surging tracks dislodging tons of the fine sand Shepley had so laboriously pushed by hand up the slope. Immediately several of the pavilions appeared to view, the white dust cascading off their cupolas.

  Half-buried in the avalanche they had set off, Traxel and Bridges leapt from the driving cab, pointing to the pavilions and shouting at each other. Shepley darted forward, put his foot up on the mono-rail just as it began to vibrate loudly.

  In the distance the gyro-car slowly approached, the Old Man punting it along, hatless and disheveled.

  He reached the tomb as Bridges was kicking the door in with a heavy boot, Traxel behind him with a bag full of wrenches.

  “Hello, Shepley!” Traxel greeted him gaily. “So this is your treasure trove.”

  Shepley staggered splay-legged through the sliding sand, brushed past Traxel as glass spattered-from the window. He flung himself on Bridges ‘and pulled the big man backwards.

  “Bridges, this one’s mine! Try any of the others, you can have them all!”

  Bridges jerked himself to his feet, staring down angrily at Shepley. Traxel peered suspiciously at the other tombs, their porticos still flooded with sand. “What’s so interesting about this one, Shepley?” he asked sardonically. Bridges roared and slammed a boot into the casement, knocking out one of the panels. Shepley dived onto his shoulders, and Bridges snarled and flung him against the wall. Before Shepley could duck he swung a heavy left cross to Shepley’s mouth, knocking him back onto the sand with a bloody face.

  Traxel roared with amusement as Shepley lay there stunned, then knelt down, sympathetically examining Shepley’s face in this light thrown by the expanding persona within the tomb. Bridges whooped with surprise, gaping like a startled ape at the sumptuous golden mirage of the enchantress.

  “How did you find me?” Shepley muttered thickly. “I doubletracked a dozen times.”

  Traxel smiled. “We didn’t follow you, chum. We followed the rail.” He pointed down at the silver thread of the metal strip, plainly visible in the dawn light almost ten miles away. “The gyro-car cleaned the rail, it led us straight here. Ah, hello, Doctor,” he greeted the Old Man as he climbed the slope and slumped down wearily beside Shepley. “I take it we have you to thank for this discovery. Don’t worry, Doctor, I shan’t forget you.”

  “Many thanks,” the Old Man said flatly. He helped Shepley to sit up, frowning at his split lips. “Aren’t you taking everything too seriously, Traxel? You’re becoming crazed with greed. Let the boy have this tomb. There are plenty more.”

  The patterns of light across the sand dimmed and broke as Bridges plunged through the persona towards the rear of the chancel. Weakly Shepley tried to stand up, but the Old Man held him back. Traxel shrugged. “Too late, Doctor.” He looked over his shoulder at the persona, ruefully shaking his head in acknowledgment of its magnificence. “These 10th Dynasty graves are stupendous. But there’s something curious about this one.”

  He was still staring at it reflectively a minute later when Bridges emerged.

  “Boy, that was a crazy one, Traxel! For a second I thought it was a dud.” He handed the three canisters to Traxel, who weighed two of them in one hand against the other. Bridges added: “Kinda light, aren’t they?”

  Traxel began to pry them open with a wrench. “Are you certain there are no more in there?”

  “Hundred per cent. Have a look yourself.”

  Two of the cans were empty, the tape spools missing. The third was only half full, a mere three-inch width of tape in its center. Bridges bellowed in pain: “The kid robbed us. I can’t believe it!” Traxel waved him away and went over to the Old Man, who was staring in at the now flickering persona. The two men exchanged glances, then nodded slowly in confirmation. With a short laugh Traxel kicked at the can containing the half reel of tape, jerking the spool out onto the sand, where it began to unravel in the quietly moving air. Bridges protested but Traxel shook his head.

  “It is a dud. Go and have a close look at the image.” When Bridges peered at it blankly he explained: “The woman there was dead when the matrices were recorded. She’s beautiful all right—as poor Shepley here discovered—but it’s all literally skin deep. That’s why there’s only half a can of data. No nervous system, no musculature or internal organs—just a beautiful golden husk. This is a mortuary tomb. If you resurrected her you’d have an ice-cold corpse on your hands.”

  “But why?” Bridges rasped. “What’s the point?”

  Traxel gestured expansively. “It’s immortality of a kind. Perhaps she died suddenly, and this was the next best thing. When the Doctor first came here there were a lot of mortuary tombs of young children being found. If I remember he had something of a reputation for always leaving them intact. A typical piece of highbrow sentimentality—giving immortality only to the dead. Agree, Doctor?”

  Before the Old Man could reply a voice shouted from below, there was a nearby roaring hiss of an ascending signal rocket and a vivid red star-shell burst over the lake below, spitting incandescent fragments over them. Traxel and Bridges leapt forwards, saw two men in a sand-car pointing up at them, three more vehicles converging across the lake half a mile away.

  “The time-wardens!” Traxel shouted. Bridges picked up the tool bag and the two men raced across the slope towards the half-track, the Old Man hobbling after them. He turned back to wait for Shepley, who was still sitting on the ground where he had fallen, watching the image inside the pavilion.

  “Shepley! Come on, lad, pull yourself together! You’ll get ten years!”

  When Shepley made no reply he reached up to the side of the half-track as Traxel reversed it expertly out of the moraine of sand, let Bridges swing him aboard. “Shepley!” he called again. Traxel hesitated, then roared away as a second star-shell exploded.

  Shepley tried to reach the tape, but the stampeding feet had severed it at several points, and the loose ends, which he had numbly thought of trying to reinsert into the projector, now fluttered around him in the sand. Below, he could hear the sounds of flight and pursuit, the warning crack of a rifle, engines baying and plunging, as Traxel eluded the time-wardens, but he kept his eyes fixed on the image’ within the tomb. Already it had begun to fragment, fading against the mounting sunlight. Getting slowly to his feet, he entered the tomb and closed the battered doors.

  Still magnificent upon her bier, the enchantress lay back between the great
wings. Motionless for so long, she had at last been galvanized into life, and a jerking syncopated rhythm rippled through her body. The wings shook uneasily, and a series of tremors disturbed the base of the catafalque, so that the woman’s feet danced an exquisitely flickering minute, the toes darting from side to side with untiring speed. Higher up, her wide smooth hips jostled each other in a jaunty mock tango.

  He watched until only the face remained, a few disconnected traces of the wings and catafalque jerking faintly in the darkness, then made his way out of the tomb.

  Outside, in the cool morning light, the time-wardens were waiting for him, hands on the hips of their white uniforms. One was holding the empty canisters, turning the fluttering strands of tape over with his foot as they drifted away.

  The other took Shepley’s arm and steered him down to the car.

  “Traxel’s gang,” he said to the driver. “This must be a new recruit.” He glanced dourly at the blood around Shepley’s mouth. “Looks as if they’ve been fighting over the spoils.”

  The driver pointed to the three drums. “Stripped?”

  The man carrying them nodded. “All three. And they were 10th Dynasty.” He shackled Shepley’s wrists to the dashboard. “Too bad, son, you’ll be doing ten yourself soon. It’ll seem like ten thousand.”

  “Unless it was a dud,” the driver rejoined, eyeing Shepley with some sympathy. “You know, one of those freak mortuary tombs.”

  Shepley straightened his bruised mouth. “It wasn’t,” he said firmly.

  The driver glanced warningly at the other wardens. “What about the tape blowing away up there?”

  Shepley looked up at the tomb spluttering faintly below the ridge, its light almost gone. “That’s just the persona,” he said. “The empty skin.”

  As the engine surged forward he listened to the three empty drums hit the floor behind the seat.

  DIE, SHADOW!

  by Algis Budrys

  I

  I’ve come a long, long way to die alone, David Greaves thought as Defiance tumbled through the misty shroud of Venus, hopelessly tom apart by the explosion in her engines. On the console in front of him, the altimeter was one of the last few meaningful instruments, and it told him there were only a few tortured miles remaining before the ship he had brought this far—had spent his fortune in building when no government would yet consider risking a manned rocket on his flight—would smash down to its doom on a planet no man had ever walked.

  Battered and tossed in his seat by the ship’s crazy tumbling, Greaves tensed the oak-hard muscles of his arms and thrust himself up to his feet. He wasn’t dead yet. He wasn’t dead and, if the slim chance paid off, he’d still be present to laugh in the government’s face when the first, safe, cautious official venture finally made its way across the emptiness between Earth and the Sun’s second planet.

  Dragging himself from handhold to handhold, his

  tendons cracking with the strain, he levered himself toward the Crash Capsule, forced open its hatch and pulled himself through, while the winds of Venus tore at the shattered hull and the scream of Defiance’s passage through the murky sky rose to a savage howl.

  Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knew what sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand might lie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not care now. If men had always waited to be sure, if all the adventurers of mankind had waited until the signposts had gone up, the cave bears would still be the dominant form of life on Earth, and races undreamed of might never know such a thing as man to contest their sway over the Universe.

  I’ll live to see my share of that, Greaves thought as he pulled the capsule’s hatch shut and dropped into the special padding that, in theory, would cushion much of the impact. Or else I’ll know I tried. He tripped the lever that would flood the capsule with Doctor Eckstrom’s special anesthetic—the experimental compound that might—just barely, might—offer a chance.

  As the hiss of the yellow-tinged, acrid gas became louder and louder in his ears, David Greaves thought again of the almost obsessive lengths to which he had gone in making sure that there would be such a thing as the capsule. The entire project—the decision to build the ship, to sacrifice for it the personal fortune he had built up in his meteoric rise from obscurity to being one of the world’s most dynamic and certainly youngest industrialists—had been marked by his fanatical persistence and dedication. But that dream had come first, and the fortune second—the sole purpose of his career, from its very beginning when he was only another engineer test pilot, had simply been to accumulate the means so Defiance could be built. But the ship had been three-quarters complete when he conceived the idea for the capsule. He could not even now remember exactly when or how he had decided that he must have some device aboard that would protect him from a crash and—here was the vital thing he insisted upon—keep him alive, no matter how injured, no matter how long might be necessary, until rescuers could reach him.

  For him to even think in terms of rescuers—of depending on others—was totally uncharacteristic. For him to divert a major portion of his dwindling resources from work on the ship itself, and push toward the elaborate design of the capsule, was, in some lights, again uncharacteristically foolish. But he had done it, and now . . .

  . . . Now the anesthetic created by the man some said was a medical genius and some said was a quack had flooded over him.

  He could feel the first effect—the calm, the drowsy peace. By the time the Defiance smashed into the ground—very soon now—his metabolism would have slowed to a carefully metered rate. It would take hours for his heart to beat once. To him it would seem as if each day was only a few minutes. The jagged nerve-flashes of pain would be only a faraway slow tingle; the blink of an eye would encompass hours of actual time, and he would lie here, safe, asleep, until the hatch was opened and he was taken out into the air, where slowly the effects would wear off.

  Meanwhile, there was more than enough gas compressed into the capsule’s tanks to keep him perfectly relaxed for a hundred years. The valve—a simple device he had sketched out in five minutes, as if the design had been part of his mind for years—would continue to meter out the supply at the optimum rate and pressure.

  It was only now—perhaps a hundred feet from impact, perhaps only a hundred hairs-breadths—that he suddenly saw the flaw in the design.

  He struggled to reach the valve, in a useless reflex, for there would have been nothing he could have done, no matter how much time remained. Then he fell back, a twisted grin on his face. I’ve come a long, long way to trap myself, he laughed in his drowsing mind, as the ship crashed, and the capsule, tom from Defiance’s side, rebounded like a cannon shell from Heaven upon the outraged soil of Venus, and the overhead clouds sprang into flamed reflection from the blast of Defiance’s end.

  In the capsule, the valve controlling the flow from the illogically copious supply of anesthetic snapped off cleanly. David Greaves’ lungs jolted to the impact as a century’s dosage of the high-pressure gas delivered its one giant hammerblow of sleep . . . of sleep like death . . .

  Of sleep so slow, so majestic, that only the eternally ageless body might testify to life. Of sleep without end, without motion, until . . .

  II

  The woman—the sensuous ivory-skinned woman with eyes like dark jewels and hair like midnight framing her red-lipped face—kissed him again and then drew back to touch his cheek.

  “Wake,” she whispered softly. “Wake, sleeper.”

  David Greaves looked up at her through slowly dawning eyes. The scent of spices was in his nostrils. As the woman’s hair brushed his face again, the fragrance increased.

  “My name is David Greaves,” he said, and looked up at the sky and then around him.

  There was now no envelope of cloud to hide the face of this planet from the Sun; no such shroud as had concealed the Venus of his day in dazzling white without and muffled it in somber black within. Th
is sky was ruddy, ruddy with the light of the day’s last moments, and the clouds through which the sunset burned were only crayon-strokes of ochre across the orange sky.

  He lay in state, facing the sunset, on some sort of black metal couch which supported him on a multitude of sweeping, back-bent arms. Beneath him, a dozen low broad steps of olive-green polished stone led down to a long forum, flagged with the same gold-veined, masterfully fitted paving. Around the court ran a low wall, again of stone; friezed, and burnished to a dull glow. From the wall, tall slim pillars thrust into the air.

  And atop each pillar, cast and carved in black metal washed by the lingering light, crouched a monster.

  No single artist could have created such a bestiary of gargoyles. Some he could trace in their evolution—the vulpine, the crustacean, the insectile. Fangs and pincers slit the cool, invigorating breeze that flowed over the court. Antennae quivered and nummed in the air, and a myriad legs were poised in tension, forever prepared to leap. Others were beyond any creation he knew of—limbs and wings contorted into shapes that had, undoubtedly, been taken by living things in lives unimaginable to any man. And all of them, imaginable or not, faced toward him forever.

  At the foot of each pillar, mounted in a cresset on the wall at its base, burned a torch. And so, when night fell, then the shadows of all these monsters would be cast upward onto the stars, and he would lie sleeping

  In the pooled light of the torches, while all around him these creatures stood watch.

  How many nights had he lain here? How many centuries to wash the fog of sleep out of every nook and cranny of his lungs, when each breath might take a thousand years—ten thousand?

  But he was not done with studying his surroundings. He had heard sound when he turned his head. Now the sound was a rising murmur as he lifted his shoulders to look down the length of the court of monsters toward the far end. There were people there. They had been seated on stone tiers that rose up toward a collonaded temple. There he could see an altar through the open sides and, on that altar, a flame that burned bright and unwinking against the outline of the lowering Sun.