A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Four big cats slunk out of the shadows by the tent. There was enough light left to show me their eyes and their teeth, and the hungry licking of their tongues.

  Laura’s voice came through the canvas, tremulous but no softer nor more yielding than the blue barrel of my gun.

  “I’m going away, Jade. At first I didn’t think there was any way, but there is. Don’t try to stop me. Please don’t try.”

  I COULD have gone and tried to find a cop. I could have called men or half-men from their jobs to help me. I didn’t. I don’t know that I could have made anybody hear me, and anyway they had enough to do. This was my job.

  My job, my carnival, my heart.

  I walked toward the tent flap, watching the cats.

  They slunk a little aside, belly down, making hoarse, whimpering noises. One was a six-legged Martian sand-cat, about the size of an Earthly leopard. Two were from Venus, the fierce white beauties of the high plateaus. The fourth was a Mercurian cave-cat, carrying its twenty-foot body on eight powerful legs and switching a tail that had bone barbs on it.

  Laura called to them. I don’t know whether she said words in their language, or whether her voice was just a bridge for thought transference, one cat brain to another. Anyway, they understood.

  “Jade, they won’t touch you if you go.”

  I fired.

  One of the white Venusians took the slug between the eyes and dropped without a whimper. Its mate let go a sobbing shriek and came for me, with the other two beside it.

  I snapped a shot at the Martian. It went over kicking, and I dived aside, rolling. The white Venusian shot over me, so close its hind claws tore my shirt. I put a slug in its belly. It just yowled and dug its toes in and came for me again. Out of the tail of my eye I saw the dying Martian tangle with the Mercurian, just because it happened to be the nearest moving object.

  I kicked the Venusian in the face. The pain must have blinded it just enough to make its aim bad. On the second jump its forepaws came down on the outer edges of my deltoids, gashing them but not tearing them out. The cat’s mouth was open clear to its stomach.

  I should have died right then. I don’t know why I didn’t, except that I didn’t care much if I did. It’s the guys that want to live that get it, seems like. The ones that don’t care go on forever.

  I got a lot of hot bad breath in my face and five parallel gashes in back, where its hind feet hit me when I rolled up. I kicked it in the belly. Its teeth snapped a half inch short of my nose, and then I got my gun up under its jaw and that was that. I had four shots left.

  I rolled the body off and turned. The Martian cat was dead. The Mercurian stood over it, watching me with its four pale, hot eyes, twitching its barbed tail. Laura stood watching us.

  SHE looked just like she had the first time I saw her. Soft gold-brown hair and purple eyes with a little tilt to them, and a soft pink mouth. She was wearing the bronze metal-cloth dress and the bronze slippers, and there was still nothing wrong with the way she was put together. She glinted dully in the dim light, warm bronze glints.

  She was crying, but there was no softness in her tears.

  The cat flicked its eyes at her and made a nervous, eager whine. She spoke to it, and it sank to its belly, not wanting to.

  Laura said, “I’m going, Jade.”

  “No.”

  I raised my gun hand. The big cat rose with it. She was beyond the cat. I could shoot the cat, but a Mercurian lives a long time after it’s shot.

  “Throw down your gun, Jade, and let me go.”

  I didn’t care if the cat killed me. I didn’t care if Death took me off piggyback right then. I suppose I was crazy. Maybe I was just numb. I don’t know. I was looking at Laura, and choking on my own heart.

  I said, “No.”

  Just a whisper of sound in. her throat, and the cat sprang. It reared up on its four hind feet and clawed at me with its four front ones. Only I wasn’t where it thought I was. I knew it was going to jump and I faded—not far, I’m no superman—just far enough so its claws raked me without gutting me. It snapped its head down to bite.

  I slammed it hard across the nose with my gun. It hurt, enough to make it wince, enough to fuddle it just for a split second. I jammed the muzzle into its nearest eye and fired.

  Laura was going off between the tents, fast, with her head down, just a pretty girl, mingling with the mob streaming off the pitch. Who’d notice her, except maybe to whistle?

  I didn’t have time to get away. I dropped down flat on. my belly and let the cat fall on top of me. I only wanted to live a couple of seconds longer. After that, the hell with it!

  The cat was doing a lot of screaming and thrashing. I was between two sets of legs. The paws came close enough to touch me, clawing up the dirt. I huddled up small, hoping it wouldn’t notice me there under its belly. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, with a cold precision. I steadied my right hand on my left wrist.

  I shot Laura three times, carefully, between the shoulders.

  The cat stopped thrashing. Its weight crushed me. I knew it was dead. I knew I’d done something that even experienced hunters don’t do in nine cases out of ten. My first bullet had found the way into the cat’s little brain and killed it.

  It wasn’t going to kill me. I pulled myself out from under it. The pitch was almost quiet now, the mob gone, the animals mostly under control. I kicked the dead cat. It had died too soon.

  My gun was empty. I remember I clicked the hammer twice. I got more bullets out of my pocket, but my fingers wouldn’t hold them and I couldn’t see to load. I threw the gun away.

  I walked away in the thin, cold fog, down toward the distant beat of the sea.

  THE HANDS

  Venard Mclaughlin

  “My brother, this is an odd moment. For this moment you and I are the only beings on Earth. You are the last beast—I am Earth’s First Man!”

  ON THE night my mother died I awoke to find my brother leaning over me, staring. In the light of the dying fire his eyes were strange and his hands were holding his wrists, in that way of his, and it came to me that the wrists of my brother Kaven had been concealed from us since childhood.

  “Our mother,” Kaven said, “is dead.” He stepped back from my cot.

  Across the one-roomed mountain cabin was our mother sitting upright in her chair, dead. Her face was livid from recent strangling death, and I knew that death, for my father had died in the same way.

  Shuddering I looked at Kaven. Now his arms hung at his sides. His eyes were watching me. “We will bury her now,” he said. “It is a good time, for the moon is coming over the peaks.”

  We buried her beside our father as the moon rose over the peaks and the cold air blew, and my brother laughed softly at my side.

  “Little beast,” he said to me, “don’t try to hide your fear. Do you think you fool Kaven? Do you?” His strange eyes held mine.

  “You killed her!” I said. “With your terrible hands you killed her. And now you will kill me!”

  My brother laughed again, softly. “I could.” He watched the moon rise in the blue sky, blue with mountain cold. “But not now. Come.” He led me back to the cabin and threw wood on the fire. “You, brother, say aloud the story of our family.”

  I SHIVERED and drew close to the orange flames. “We are the last people of Earth,” I began. “Father brought us into the peaks for he had once saved the son of Ahriman from death and the god was pleased and saved our father and his family, of whom we are the last, from the waters and the fire and the sickness.”

  My brother smiled as though listening to sounds deep beneath the Earth or far out into space, but he had heard me for he answered, “Thus were you taught, little beast.”

  Again he seemed to be listening to unheard things and his hands clasped his wrists, and fear was deep within me. I shivered in fear for now I remembered that the moon was over the peaks, that it was night; yet Kaven my brother was here in the cabin.

  Always
at night he was gone—always, when the moon rose over the peaks. Always—except the night my father died, and this night at the death of my mother . . .

  “Little beast,” he said softly. He was close to me. One of his terrible hands closed on my arm. “Listen, now. Forget that old wives’ tale of our fathers. Ahriman knows no gratitude. He brought our family here only that I, Kaven, might be born while the human race perished beneath our peaks. This is an odd moment of history. . .” He paused and his glittering eyes gazed into the fire, “. . . two races of beings face each other. The Man and the beast.”

  I shrank back until the flames burned my flesh. “But we—we are both human beings, my brother!” Fear was deep in that place, holding me—a cold, deep fear.

  KAVEN shook his head. “Little fool. You are a beast. Our father was a beast. All the billions of Earth’s talking bipeds who for centuries have called themselves Man—they are nothing but speaking beasts. . . My brother, this is an odd moment. For this moment you and I are the only beings on Earth. You are the last beast—I am Earth’s first Man!”

  “No!” I cried.

  His hand tightened on my arm. “Listen, little beast. Think of the days before Ahriman sent the waters and the fire and the sickness. Remember the animals, the fish, the birds, and the race called by itself Man? Remember the bellies of them all, the lusts of them all, the senses of them all, the brains of them all—all, all alike! No difference except perhaps in degree . . .”

  “No!” I cried. Tears of fear blinded me. A horror of new belief swept over me.

  “What difference?” my brother asked softly, “between a king and a rainbow trout, a lawyer and a mountain goat? Degree only. Intelligence? Hardly. In the passions of love, war, hate and greed the beasts calling themselves Man were stupider than the animals of the field, the fish of the sea!” My brother laughed silently.

  I was sobbing how in terror. “But the cities! The machines! The beautiful and tremendous things Man has wrought . . .!”

  “Ah!” said my brother.

  “The mighty works of the hands of Man!” I cried, “second only to the might of Ahriman!”

  MY BROTHER’S eyes burned into me. “The hands of man,” he repeated softly. He raised his own terrible hands into the light of the fire—dark, muscled, all-powerful hands—and held them before me stretched out from the taut-strained cuffs of his. shirt. “Hands! Yes, the human beast, like the ape, had hands. But like the ape his belly and his lusts guided the hands. The ape used hands to gather food. Has the human beast done more, save in degree?”

  “The cities, the machines . . .”

  With a movement of his terrible hands my brother silenced me. “You would have been happier beasts and suffered less had Ahriman cut away your hands. They destroyed you for you were beasts.” Once again he raised his terrible hands in the orange light. “Know now the first Man!”

  As his words sounded the peaks moved and Earth dust showered up toward the moon. Even my brother paled for in those signs was knowledge that Ahriman was abroad.

  “Ahriman . . .” I whispered.

  “Ahriman!” my brother said.

  AND AHRIMAN was there in the cabin for the fire was blotted out in liquid blackness and we were blinded and motionless in his presence. The peaks groaned and the shudderings of Earth under the weight of Ahriman were awful.

  “Silence,” Ahriman said, and there was sudden silence as deep as the blackness. “The time is at hand, sons of Koje. Earth waits bowed before the two beings, the beast and the Man. Which is to rule the finite things of Ahriman?”

  “I!” cried my brother. “For I am the first Man. Go with me, O Ahriman, out over the world I have built in the nights—go with me and you will know that I am Man!”

  Seized in mortal terror, I waited. The pain of Ahriman’s presence bit through flesh and bone and sinew. “Ah!” I cried in agony. “Ah! Mercy!”

  “Who speaks?” asked Ahriman.

  “The last beast,” my brother said.

  Ahriman laughed. “My human beasts die hard. In him they have their last chance. In you, Kaven son of Koje, Man has his first.”

  The blackness vanished and I lay on the cabin floor near the ruined fire sick to death. My brother laughed.

  “You heard. Now, fool, do you believe?”

  In the dim light his eyes glowed. Slowly he came toward me. One of his terrible hands loosened the cuff at the wrist of the other and with a snap the wrist was laid bare and a great feathered wing sprang from his flesh, filling the room. And then the other wrist flashed naked sending forth its wing and in rhythm to the groaning of the peaks the wings beat.

  FASTER and faster, the wings beat until they sped invisible and the air from them was a blast. And with a great sweeping roar the terrible hands of my brother rushed from the cabin, and the body of my brother fell into my arms, and I laid it on the floor near the ruined fire and covered it with an old sail cloth from the days below of the waters.

  “There is but one thing to do,” I said at last aloud. “I must follow the hands of my brother. Ahriman has pitted us against each other and if I am a beast and he is Man, I am nevertheless what I am and I will do the best I can to establish myself on this earth.”

  Packing a knapsack and rekindling the fire so that my brother’s body should. not die of cold, I set out over the moon-drenched peaks. It was bitter cold and so still that the grind of the peaks was audible like a child’s whisper, and I saw far over the eastern horizon the night-world of my brother.

  “I will go and study this night-world,” I said. “For my world below is yet washed with the sickness, and I too will have to make a world for Ahriman.” For a moment the peaks were deathly still, and I knew Ahriman had heard.

  I leaped forward, then, and swam through space as the son of Ahriman had taught my father until I came to the turrets of the night-world of Kaven my brother. It was a high, unbelievable world of dark blue and its spires reached far beyond the Golden Cycle where the banished Legion lived and its streets were broad as life and paved with diamonds from the deepest mines and the power of this world was barely a whisper of turbines buried in the living rock, and it was a perfect world for no life was their but the hands of my brother.

  SILENT, invisible hands, building and building, rock upon rock, metal upon metal, higher and higher. I sat in the great central garden of this world and gazed in awe. Nothing like it had ever before been dreamed. Minarets and spires, lakes and castles, endless arches of marble and gold, flashing surface craft and silent air cars, spears of rainbow light and soft hidden music—all controlled by vast intricate mechanism subject to the lightest touch of the hands of my brother.

  At midnight I grew hungry but I dared not open my knapsack to eat. In that crystal cold air of purity even the presence of my body defiled. To eat was unthinkable. This night-world was too lofty for that. And as midnight passed I grew afraid.

  “Kaven!” I called in fear to my brother, but there was only silence, and I thought of the banished Legion and ran to a giant spire of gold stretching beyond the Golden Cycle and leaped into a rocket car to flash alert.

  “Someone there,” I thought, “will talk to me and save me from the fear of this perfect night-world. Some one of the banished.”

  I jumped from the car as it flashed into the Golden Cycle and fell stunned until voices sounded about me and an arm raised my head and a liquor was poured down my throat.

  “A visitor,” said a voice at my side. “But he is neither banished nor total Man—and the beasts are all dead . . .”

  I LOOKED into the dark grave face of a young man and past him at the faces of the banished—all grave, proud people whom Ahriman had never been able to bend to his will. My eyes jumped back to the one who had spoken and widened in amazement.

  He smiled. “Son of Koje, do you know me?”

  “You—you are Ahriman’s son!” I cried. “Banished!”

  He stood up and lifted me to my feet. The soft glow of the Golden Cycle was all about us an
d far below was the night-world of my brother, and beyond that was death-ridden Earth.

  “Banished by my own choice,” he said. “I distrust this new race of total Man. I prefer the Legion to that hideous night-world, or to dead Earth.”

  I shuddered at the mention of the night-world. Hideous, it was. Beautiful and perfect—but horrible. “They say I am a beast,” I said, “that all mankind were beasts and that I alone remain to get back Earth for my kind . . .”

  Ahriman’s son stared. “There is one of you left? The son of Koje—a human being—and yet alive?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  With a clap of his hands the god’s son brought the Legion together—men and and women from all ages, strong and proud. He addressed them.

  “My Unconquered, our visitor is the last of the human race. He is pitted against the coming total Man for supreme command of Earth. Are you willing to aid him in the struggle, remembering that my dread father, Ahriman, fights on the other side?”

  With one voice they answered, “Yes!” Among them were those of the future whose souls were too strong for the tricks of time. All hated Ahriman, the dread god of darkness, with an everlasting vengeance.

  They counselled, and then sent me back to the night-world to speak with the hands of my brother, and back to survey death-ridden Earth. “Report, then,” said the son of Ahriman. “And have courage.”

  EVEN IN the descending rocket car I felt a change and a menace in the night-world. Ahriman had walked there and the dread of his presence lingered, and as I stole back into the central garden I knew that the hands of my brother were no longer alone.

  The air was full of soft rustling—the coming and going of invisible and terrible hands. And now the world was growing before my eyes’, rising in unspeakable splendor and magnitude.

  “Kaven!” I shouted, “you are not alone. There are others with you! Listen to me.”