Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories
Page 10
“Me tickle you up a bit, maybe. Talk different, then.”
Mason stared at the bayonet. “You keep that thing out of my reach, Joe,” he warned, “or I’ll take it away from you and slit your gizzard with it.”
“Commander see you in little while. Talk with you. Then we take you out, kill you.” The Jap squinted his eyes to see how Mason took it.
“You scummy little buzzards get a big kick out of killing people, don’t you?” said Mason.
“You talk too much,” hissed the Jap.
“Sez you!” said Mason.
The guard stepped inside the hut, moved closer, bayonetted rifle held stiffly in front of him.
“Me mess you up a bit,” he decided.
“The commander won’t like that,” Mason warned.
“Commander won’t care. Just so not too much.”
He advanced with mincing steps, pushing the pointed steel closer and closer. Mason watched it idly, but the blood was pounding in his throat. This baiting of the guard was taking a chance, an awful chance.
The Jap danced nearer, eyes sparkling.
The bayonet was no more than six inches away when Mason moved…moved like an unwinding coil spring. With a single motion he slapped the bayonet aside, rose to his feet and hit the Jap with his fist. The swing was a round-house blow, coming almost from the floor. It caught the Jap on the chin even before he could look surprised, lifted him off the floor, slammed him against the wall.
Glassy-eyed, the man sagged to the floor.
Grunting in satisfaction, Mason picked up the fallen rifle, used the bayonet, then bent above the erstwhile guard and took the long-handled thing from his pocket. It was a grenade, all right.
Clutching it in his hand, he walked to the door of the hut, stuck out his head, glanced cautiously up and down. There seemed to be Japs everywhere, but none of them were looking in his direction.
There was, he decided, only one way to do it. If he ran, they’d notice him, be on him in a minute, sure he was making a break. But if he walked he might not attract attention. They might be puzzled, but they might think it was all right, give him the time he needed.
Regretfully, he leaned the rifle against the wall, slipped the grenade in his belt and sauntered out into the open.
Walking slowly, he had gone a hundred feet when someone yelled at him. Stifling a desire to run, he kept on unhurriedly. The yell was not repeated.
Another hundred feet. Those fuel barrels were nearer now, much nearer. Just a few more steps and in a pinch he could reach them.
Another shout. A chorus of shouts and the patter of running feet.
Mason jerked the grenade from his belt, snapped out the pin and heaved. Then he ducked and ran. Rifles cracked and chugging things kicked up dust at his feet and in front of him.
He doubled behind a hut, ran full tilt into a startled soldier. From the field came the roar of the grenade, the gushy sigh of rushing flame.
The impact had knocked the soldier off his balance and, as he staggered, Mason reached out and snatched away his rifle.
A rocky hillside lay just ahead. He sprinted for it. Something tugged at his side and a sharp jab of pain went through him.
Behind him an oil drum exploded with a hollow boom. He snatched a quick glance over his shoulder. Black smoke was mushrooming far above the field.
Also, and more important, at least a dozen Japs were on his heels.
He swung around and snapped the rifle up. The mechanism was unfamiliar, but he got in two shots. Both counted. Then he was running again, stumbling as something smacked into his shoulder.
A roaring filled his head and he went down on hands and knees. This was the end, he knew. They’d get him now. He’d be cold meat for the Japs and no mistake.
But the roaring wasn’t all in his head. There was another roar. The throaty roar of a motor sweeping down into the bowl. And then another sound. The chattering of guns, a wicked, vicious sound, a snarling crescendo that seemed to sweep down upon him, then snapped off.
He flopped over and sat down, stared into the sky.
Climbing over the field was a ship—a ship he’d know anywhere. The Avenger he’d left back on the beach!
The camp was in pandemonium. Shrieking Japs were running. In front of him lay five of them, where they had been mowed down by the strafing guns. “Steve,” he yelled. “Give it to ’em, Steve!”
As if in answer, a black object leaped from the belly of the plane and streaked earthward. Earth and dust billowed up in a flash of fire and rolling smoke. Another bomb was falling and again the hills echoed with the thud of a five-hundred-pounder.
The camouflaged planes were gone, fire licking through them.
Painfully, hopefully, Mason got back on his hands and knees and crawled. Maybe if he got up that hillside when nobody was noticing him, he might have a chance.
Another bomb shook the earth and Mason counted: “Three.” There was one left.
The explosion came. That was all there was.
An anti-aircraft cut loose and the Avenger howled in answer, howled, then stuttered with fiendish gunbursts.
Feet pattered behind Mason and someone bent to lift him.
“Me carry,” said N’Goni.
“N’Goni,” yelled Mason. “What are you doing here?”
But he didn’t wait for the answer, for, even as he spoke, a sound came that chilled his heart. The coughing of the Avenger’s motor.
Then he remembered. There had been only a little gas. Now that was used up. The ship would fall.
He struggled to his feet and watched, with a dull ache in his heart. The Grumman, prop barely turning over, was wheeling toward the very hillside where he stood. Plunging at them, faster and faster.
“Is that Steve?” shouted Mason at N’Goni. “Is that Steve in there?”
“Maybe,” said N’Goni. “Him go back. Hear guns. So him go.”
So Steve had come back. Had heard guns and had come back. Figuring he’d keep his gunner out of trouble, get him out of a mess.
The Avenger lifted its nose slightly as it hit the up-currents of the hillside, seemed for a moment almost to stall and then crashed no more than a hundred yards above them.
N’Goni was loping up the hill, eating up the distance, while Mason limped behind.
Down below the Jap base was ablaze, thick columns of smoke standing in the air. The parked planes were burning, gas dumps were belching thick black clouds.
A new sound stopped Mason in his tracks. The distant hum of many motors. A hum that grew until it was a roar and then a shriek
Streaming over the lip of the bowl was a formation of American bombers, bombers that howled down upon the Japs with blazing guns and a roar of bombs. Blindly Mason stumbled up the hillside.
N’Goni was helping Foster out of the Avenger and, through the blood that streamed from a cut across his forehead, the pilot grinned at Mason.
“You O.K.”” gasped Mason.
“Right as rain,” said Foster.
“But N’Goni, how did the Americans know? You couldn’t have gotten there and got back this soon.”
“Me send brother,” N’Goni explained. “Remember got to work for Jap. No work, Jap mad. Kill family, maybe. So send brother. Tell him what to say.”
“So that’s why you ran out on me,” said Foster.
N’Goni grinned. “Me remember quick. Mad Jap, bad Jap.”
“They aren’t mad now,” said Foster. “They’re just plain scared to death.”
The base was a froth of smoke and flame and bellowing motors as the Yank planes crossed and criss-crossed it, sowing destruction. With guns and bombs, the Japs were being wiped out. “You sit,” said N’Goni. “You watch. Me, too.”
He hunkered down, grinning.
“Grand stand seat,” said Foster.
Courtesy
“Courtesy” is a morality tale, one that I believe represents yet another aspect of Cliff Simak’s reactions to World War II, so recently ended: the need to avoid thinking, and acting, as if you’re a member of a superior race. Yet “Courtesy” represents a puzzle for Simak fans, for while it’s one of the few stories in which Cliff apparently used characters who would reappear in a later story—“Junkyard,” published in 1953—you will see that if the stories are related, they were, strangely, not written and published in the correct order. (It’s true that Cliff sometimes reused character names, but this is not one of those cases; it is clear that they were the same characters; I lean toward the idea that Cliff actually began “Junkyard” first, but there is absolutely no evidence to support that speculation.)
—dww
The serum was no good. The labels told the story.
Dr. James H. Morgan took his glasses off and wiped them carefully, cold terror clutching at his innards. He put the spectacles back on, probing at them with a thick, blunt finger to settle them into correct position. Then he took another look. He had been right the first time. The date on the serum consignment was a good ten years too old.
He wheeled slowly, lumbered a few ponderous steps to the tent flap and stood there, squat body framed in the triangular entrance, pudgy hands gripping the canvas on either side.
Outside, the fantastic lichen moors stretched to gray and bleak horizons. The setting sun was a dull red glow in the west—and to the east, the doctor knew, night already was beginning to close in, with that veil of purplish light that seemed to fall like a curtain upon the land and billow rapidly across it.
A chill wind blew out of the east, already touched with the frigidity of night, and twitched the canvas beneath the doctor’s fingers.
“Ah, yes,” said Dr. Morgan, “the merry moors of Landro.”
A lonely place, he told himself. Not lonely only in its barrenness nor in its alien wildness, but with an ingrained loneliness that could drive a man mad if he were left alone with it.
Like a great cemetery, he thought, an empty place of dead. And yet without the cemetery’s close association, without the tenderness and the inevitability of a cemetery. For a cemetery held in scared trust the husks of those who once had lived and this place was an emptiness that held no memory at all.
But not for long, said Dr. Morgan. Not for long now.
He stood looking at the barren slope that rose above the camp and he decided that it would make an eminently satisfactory cemetery.
All places looked alike. That was the trouble. You couldn’t tell one place from another. There were no trees and there were no bushes, just a fuzzy-looking scrub that grew here and there, clothing the naked land in splotches, like the ragged coat that a beggar wears.
Benny Falkner stopped on the path as it topped the rise and stood rigid with the fear that was mounting in him. Fear of the coming night and of its bitter cold, fear of the silent hills and the shadowed swales, and the more distant and yet more terrible fear of the little natives that might this very moment be skulking on the hillside.
He put up his arm and wiped the sweat off his brow with his tattered sleeve. He shouldn’t have been sweating, he told himself, for it was chilly now and getting colder by the minute. In another hour or two it would be cold enough to freeze a man unprotected in the open.
He fought down the terror that choked his throat and set his teeth a-chatter and for an instant stood stock-still to convince himself he was not panic-stricken.
He had been going east and that meant he must go west to reach the camp again. Although the catch was that he couldn’t be absolutely sure he had been going east all the time—he might have trended north a little or even wandered south. But the deviation couldn’t have been enough, he was sure, to throw him so far off that he could not spot the camp by returning straight into the west.
Sometime soon he should sight the smoke of the Earthmen’s camp. Any ridge, the next ridge, each succeeding hummock in the winding trail, he had assured himself, would bring him upon the camp itself. He would reach higher ground and there the camp would be, spread out in front of him, with the semicircle of white canvas gleaming in the fading light and the thin trail of smoke rising from the larger cook tent where Bat Ears Brady would be bellowing one of his obscene songs.
But that had been an hour ago when the sun still stood a good two hands high. He remembered now, standing on the ridge-top, that he had been a little nervous, but not really apprehensive. It had been unthinkable, then, that a man could get himself lost in an hour’s walk out of camp.
Now the sun was gone and the cold was creeping in and the wind had a lonely sound he had not noticed when the light was good.
One more rise, he decided. One more ridge, and if that is not the one, I’ll give up until morning. Find a sheltered place somewhere, a rock face of some sort that will give me some protection and reflect a campfire’s heat—if I can find anything with which to make a campfire.
He stood and listened to the wind moaning across the land behind him and it seemed to him there was a whimper in the sound, as if the wind were anxious, that it might be following on his track, sniffing out his scent.
Then he heard the other sound, the soft, padding sound that came up the hill toward him.
Ira Warren sat at his desk and stared accusingly at the paperwork stacked in front of him. Reluctantly he took some of the papers off the stack and laid them on the desk.
That fool Falkner, he thought. I’ve told them and I’ve told them that they have to stick together, that no one must go wandering off alone.
A bunch of babies, he told himself savagely. Just a bunch of drooling kids, fresh out of college, barely dry behind the ears and all hopped up with erudition, but without any common sense. And not a one of them would listen. That was the worst of it, not a one of them would listen.
Someone scratched on the canvas of the tent.
“Come in,” called Warren.
Dr. Morgan entered.
“Good evening, commander,” he said.
“Well,” said Warren irritably, “what now?”
“Why, now,” said Dr. Morgan, sweating just a little. “It’s the matter of the serum.”
“The serum?”
“The serum,” said Dr. Morgan. “It isn’t any good.”
“What do you mean?” asked Warren. “I have troubles, doctor. I can’t play patty-cake with you about your serum.”
“It’s too old,” said Morgan. “A good ten years too old. You can’t use old serum. You see, it might …”
“Stop chattering,” commanded Warren, sharply. “The serum is too old, you say. When did you find this out?”
“Just now.”
“You mean this very moment?”
Morgan nodded miserably.
Warren pushed the papers to one side very carefully and deliberately. He placed his hands on the desk in front of him and made a tent out of his fingers.
“Tell me this, doctor,” said Warren, speaking cautiously, as if he were hunting in his mind for the exact words which he must use, “how long has this expedition been on Landro?”
“Why,” said Morgan, “quite some time, I’d say.” He counted mental fingers. “Six weeks, to be exact.”
“And the serum has been here all that time?”
“Why, of course,” said Morgan. “It was unloaded from the ship at the same time as all the other stuff.”
“It wasn’t left around somewhere, so that you just found it? It was taken to your ten
t at once?”
“Of course it was,” said Morgan. “The very first thing. I always insist upon that procedure.”
“At any time in the last six weeks, at any given moment in any day of that whole six weeks, you could have inspected the serum and found it was no good? Isn’t that correct, doctor?”
“I suppose I could have,” Morgan admitted. “It was just that…”
“You didn’t have the time,” suggested Warren, sweetly.
“Well, not that,” said Morgan.
“You were, perhaps, too pressed with other interests?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“You were aware that up to a week ago we could have contacted the ship by radio and it could have turned back and took us off. They would have done that if we had let them know about the serum.”
“I know that.”
“And you know now that they’re outside our radio range. We can’t let them know. We can’t call them back. We won’t have any contact with the human race for the next two years.”
“I,” said Morgan, weakly, “I…”
“It’s been lovely knowing you,” Warren told him. “Just how long do you figure it will be before we are dead?”
“It will be another week or so before we’ll become susceptible to the virus,” Morgan said. “It will take, in certain stubborn cases, six weeks or so for it to kill a man.”
“Two months,” said Warren. “Three, at the outside. Would you say that was right, Dr. Morgan?”
“Yes,” said Morgan.
“There is something that I want you to tell me,” Warren said.
“What is it?” Morgan asked.
“Sometime when you have a moment, when you have the time and it is no inconvenience to you, I should like to know just how it feels to kill twenty-five of your fellow men.”
“I,” said Morgan, “I…”
“And yourself, of course,” said Warren. “That makes twenty-six.”
Bat Ears Brady was a character. For more than thirty years now he had been going out on planetary expeditions with Commander Ira Warren, although Warren had not been a commander when it started, but a second looey. Today they were still together, a team of toughened planet-checkers. Although no one on the outside would have known that they were a team, for Warren headed the expedition and Bat Ears cooked for them.