The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  The mountains leaned away from the Sun, and the shadows crawled up the lower slopes. Then Saul and the others returned.

  Trevor looked up at their faces and laughed without mirth. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Saul, and shivered. “Yes…”

  “Did he speak to you?”

  “He started to. But—we ran.”

  And Saul suddenly cried, out of the depths of fear this time and not of hate, “We can never kill him. It’s his valley. And oh God, we’re trapped in here with him, we can’t get out.”

  “We can get out,” said Trevor.

  7

  Saul stared at him sickly. “There’s no way over the mountains. There isn’t even air up there.”

  “There’s a way. I found it in the ship.”

  Trevor stood up, speaking with a sudden harshness. “Not a way for us all, not now, but if three or four of us go, one may live to make it. And he could bring back men with ships for the others.”

  He looked at Saul. “Will you try it with me?”

  The gaunt man said hoarsely, “I still don’t trust you, Trevor! But anything—anything, to get away from that…”

  “I’ll go too,” Jen said suddenly. “I’m as strong as Saul.”

  That was true, and Trevor knew it. He stared at her for a long minute, but he could not read her face.

  Saul shrugged. “All right.”

  “But it’s all craziness!” murmured a voice. “You can’t breathe up there on the ridges. There’s no air!”

  Trevor climbed painfully into what was left of the twisted wreck, and brought out the helmets and oxygen bottles that had survived for just this purpose.

  “We’ll breathe,” he said. “These—” He tried for a word that would explain to them, “—these containers hold an essence of air. We can take them with us and breathe.”

  “But the cold?”

  “You have tanned skins, haven’t you? And gums? I can show you how to make us protective garments. Unless you’d rather stay here with Shannach.”

  Saul shivered a little. “No, we’ll try it.”

  In all the hours that followed—while the women of the slaves worked with soft tanned skins and resinous gums, while Trevor labored over the clumsy helmets they must have—in all that time, Shannach was silent.

  Silent, but not gone. Trevor felt that shadow on his mind, he knew that Shannach was watching. Yet the Last One made no attempt upon him.

  The slaves watched him, too. He saw the fear and hatred still in their eyes as they looked at the sun-stone between his brows.

  And Jen watched him, and said nothing, and he could read nothing at all in her face. Was she thinking of Hugh and how the hawks had come?

  By mid-afternoon they were ready. They started climbing slowly, toward the passes that went up beyond the sky. He and Saul and Jen were three grotesque and shapeless figures, in the three-layered garments of skin that were crudely sealed with gum, and the clumsy helmets that were padded out with cloth because there was no collar-rest to hold them. Their faces were wrapped close, and they held the ends of the oxygen tubes in their mouths because no amount of ingenuity could make the helmets space-tight.

  The evening shadow flowed upward from the valley floor as they climbed, and the men who had come to help them dropped back. These three went on, with Saul leading the way and Trevor last.

  And still Shannach had not spoken.

  The atmosphere slipped behind them. They were climbing into space now, tiny creatures clambering up an infinity of virgin rock, in the utter black between the blazing peaks above and the flaring lightnings of the evening storm below.

  Up and up toward the pass, toiling forward painfully with each other’s help where no man could have made it alone, through a numbing and awful cold and silence. Three clumsy, dragging figures, up here above the sky itself, walking in the awfulness of infinity, where the rocks their feet dislodged rushed away as noiseless as a dream, where there was no sound, no light, no time.

  Trevor knew they must have reached the pass, for on both sides now there rose up slopes that had never been touched by wind or rain or living root. He staggered on, and presently the ground began to drop and the way was easier. They had passed the crest. And the oxygen was almost gone.

  Downward now, stumbling, slipping, sliding, yearning toward the air below. And they were on the other side of the mountain, above the plain of rock that led to…

  And then, at last, Shannach—laughed.

  “Clever,” he said. “Oh, very clever, to escape without a ship! But you will come back, with a ship, and you will take me to the outside world. And I will reward you greatly.”

  “No,” said Trevor, in his mind. “No, Shannach. If we make it, the sun-stone comes out, and we’ll come back for the slaves, not for you!”

  “No, Trevor.” The gentle finality of that denial was coldly frightening. “You are mine now. You surprised and tricked me once, but I know the trick now. Your whole mind is open to me. You cannot withstand me ever again.”

  It was cold, cold in the darkness below the pass, and the chill went deep into Trevor’s soul and froze it.

  Saul and Jen were below him now, stumbling down along the rock-strewn lip of a chasm, into the thin high reaches of the air, into sound and life again. He saw them tear away their helmets. He followed them, pulling off his own, gasping the frigid breath into his starved lungs. Shannach said softly, “We do not need them any longer. They would be a danger when you reach other men. Dispose of them, Trevor.”

  Trevor started a raging refusal, and then his mind was gripped as by a great hand, shaken and turned and changed. And his fury flowed away into blankness.

  But of course, he thought. There are many boulders, and I can topple them into the chasm so easily…

  He started toward a jagged stone mass, one that would quite neatly brush the two clumsy figures below him into the abyss.

  “That is the way, Trevor! But quickly—!”

  Trevor knew that Shannach had spoken truth, and that this time he was conquered.

  “No, I won’t!” he cried to himself, but it was only a weak echo from a fading will-power, a dying self.

  “You will, Trevor! And now! They suspect.”

  Saul and Jen had turned. Trevor’s face, open now to the numbing cold which he could scarcely feel, must have told them everything. They started scrambling back up toward him. Only a short distance, but they would be too late.

  Trevor shrieked thinly, “Look out—Shannach…!”

  He had his hands on it now, on the boulder he must roll to crush them.

  But there was another way! He was Shannach’s while he lived, but there was a way to avoid again betraying Jen’s people, and that way was to live no longer.

  He used the last of his dying will to pitch himself toward the brink of the chasm. Hundreds of feet below a man could lie quiet on the rocks through all eternity.

  “Trevor, no! No!”

  Shannach’s powerful command halted him as he swayed on the very edge. And then Jen’s arms caught him from behind.

  He heard Saul’s voice crying, thin and harsh in that upper air, “Push him over! He’s a Korin. You saw his face!”

  Jen answered, “No! He tried to kill himself for us!”

  “But Shannach has him!” Saul cried out.

  Shannach had him, indeed, stamping down that final flicker of Trevor’s revolt, fiercely commanding him.

  “Slay the woman and the man!”

  Trevor tried to. He was all Shannach’s now. He tried earnestly and with all his strength to kill them, but both the woman and the man had hold of him now. They were too strong for him, and he could not obey the Last One as he wanted to.

  “Tie his arms!” Jen was shouting. “We can take him, and he can’t do us any harm!”

  The anger of Shannach flooded through Trevor, and he raged and struggled, and it was useless. Strips of hide secured his arms and they were dragging him on down out of the mountains,
and he could not obey. He could not!

  And then he felt the anger of Shannach ebb away into a terrible hopelessness. Trevor felt his own consciousness going, and he went into the darkness bearing in his mind the echo of that last bitter cry, “I am old—too old…”

  8

  Trevor awakened slowly, rising above the dark sea of oblivion only to sink again, conscious in those brief intervals that he lay in a bed and that his head ached.

  There came a time when he rose, not to sink again. After a while his eyes opened, and he saw a metal ceiling.

  “We made it,” he said.

  “Yes, you made it,” said a friendly voice. “This is Solar City. You’ve been here quite a while.”

  Trevor turned his head to the voice, to the white-jacketed doctor beside his bed. But he didn’t see the man or the room. Not at first. He saw only, upon the bedside table in a tray, a tawny eye that winked and glittered at him.

  A sun-stone.

  His hand started to rise weakly to his face. The doctor forestalled him.

  “Don’t bother. It’s out. And a delicate job getting it out, it was. You’ll have a headache for a while, but anyone would take a headache for a sun-stone!”

  Trevor didn’t answer that. He said suddenly, “Jen—and Saul…?”

  “They’re here. Pretty odd folk they are, too. Won’t talk to any of us. You’re all a blazing mystery, you know.”

  He went away. When he came back, Jen and Saul were with him. They wore modern synthecloth garments now. Jen looked as incongruous in hers as a leopardess in a silk dress.

  She saw the smile in his eyes and cried, “Don’t laugh at me—ever!”

  It occurred to Trevor that civilizing her would take a long time. He doubted if it would ever be done. And he was glad of that.

  She stood looking gravely down at him and then said, “They say you can get up tomorrow.”

  “That’s good,” said Trevor.

  “You’ll have to be careful for a while.”

  “Yes. I’ll be careful.”

  They said no more than that, but in her steady, grave gaze Trevor read that Hugh and the hawks were forgiven, not forgotten but forgiven, that they two had touched each other and would not let go again.

  Saul cried anxiously, “Days we’ve waited! When can we go back to the valley with a ship for the others?”

  Trevor turned to the curiously watching doctor. “Can I charter a ship here?”

  “A man with a sun-stone can get almost anything he wants, Trevor! I’ll see about it.”

  The chartered ship that took them back to the valley had a minimum crew, and two mining technicians Trevor had hired. They set down outside the ancient city, and the slaves came surging toward them, half in eagerness, half in awe of this embodiment of misty legend.

  Trevor had told Saul what to do. Out up the valley, in the skulls of slain Korins, were sun-stones worth many fortunes. They were going out with the slaves.

  “But they’re evil—evil!” Saul had cried.

  “Not in the outside worlds,” Trevor told him. “You people are going to need a start somewhere.”

  When that was done, when they were all in the ship, Trevor nodded to the two mining technicians.

  “Now,” he said. “The entrance to the catacomb is right over there.”

  The two went away, carrying their bulky burden slung between them. Presently they came back again without it.

  Trevor took his sun-stone from his pocket. Jen clutched his arm and cried, “No!”

  “There’s no danger now,” he said. “He hasn’t time enough left to do anything with me. And—I feel somehow that I should tell him—”

  He put the sun-stone to his brow, and in his mind he cried, “Shannach!”

  And into his mind came the cold, tremendous presence of the Last One. In an instant it had read Trevor’s thoughts.

  “So this is the end, Trevor?”

  “Yes,” Trevor said steadily. “The end.”

  He was braced for the wild reaction of alarm and passion, the attempt to seize his mind, to avert doom.

  It didn’t come. Instead, from the Last One, came a stunning pulse of gladness, of mounting joy.

  “Why—why, you want me to do this?” Trevor cried.

  “Yes, Trevor! Yes! I had thought that the centuries of waiting for death would be long yet, and lonely. But this, this will free me now!”

  Dazed by surprise, Trevor slowly made a gesture, and their ship throbbed upward into the sky. Another gesture, and the technician beside him reached toward the key of the radio-detonator.

  In that moment he felt the mind of Shannach crying out as in a vast, mingled music, a glad chorus of release against chords of cosmic sorrow for all that had been and would never be again, for the greatest and oldest of races that was ending.

  The receding city below erupted flame and rock around the catacomb mouth as the key was pressed.

  And the song of Shannach ebbed into silence, as the last of the children of mountains went forever into night.

  The Tweener

  A taxicab turned the corner and came slowly down the street.

  “Here he is!” shrieked the children, tearing open the white gate. “Mother! Dad! He’s here, Uncle Fred’s here!”

  Matt Winslow came out onto the porch, and in a minute Lucille came too, flushed from the purgatory of a kitchen on a July day. The cab stopped in front of the house. Josh and Barbie pounced on it like two small tigers, howling, and from up and down the street the neighbors’ young came drifting, not making any noise, recognizing that this was the Winslows’ moment and not intruding on it, but wanting to be close to it, to breathe and see and hear the magic.

  “Look at them,” said Matt, half laughing. “You’d think Fred was Tarzan, Santa Claus, and Superman, all rolled into one.”

  “Well,” said Lucille proudly, “not many people have been where he has.”

  She went running down the path. Matt followed her. Inside, he was jealous. It was nothing personal, he liked Lucille’s brother and respected him. It was only that Josh and Barbie had never had that look in their eyes for him. This was a secret jealousy, that Matt hid carefully, frighteningly, even from himself.

  Fred got out of the cab, trim and soldierly in his uniform with the caduceus on the collar tabs, but forgetting all about dignity as he tried to hug the kids and kiss his sister and shake Matt’s hand all at once. “I’ll get your bags,” said Matt, and the neighbors’ children stared with enormous eyes and sent the name of Mars whispering back and forth between them.

  “Be careful,” Fred said. “That one there, with the handle on it—let me.” He lifted it out, a smallish box made from pieces of packing case that still showed Army serial numbers. It had little round holes bored in its top and sides. Fred waved the children back. “Don’t joggle it, it’s a rare Martian vase I brought back for your mother, and I don’t want it broken. Presents for you? Now what do you think of that—I clean forgot! Oh well, there wasn’t much out there you’d have wanted, anyway.”

  “Not even a rock?” cried Josh, and Fred shook his head solemnly. “Not a pebble.” Barbie was staring at the holes in the box. Matt picked up Fred’s suitcase. “He hasn’t changed,” he thought. “Lost some weight, and got some new lines in his face, but with the kids he hasn’t changed. He still acts like one himself.” He, too, looked at the holes in the box, but with apprehension. “This is going to be good,” he thought. “Something special.”

  “God, it’s hot,” said Fred, screwing up his eyes as though the sunlight hurt them. “Ten months on Mars is no way to train up for an eastern summer. Barbie, don’t hang on your old uncle, he’s having trouble enough.” He glanced at Matt and Lucille, grinning ruefully, and made a pantomime of giving at the knees. “I feel as though I’m wading in glue.”

  “Sit down on the porch,” Lucille said. “There’s a little breeze—”

  “In a minute,” Fred said. “But first, don’t you want to see your present?” He set the b
ox down, in a shady spot under the big maple at the corner of the house.

  “Now Fred, what are you up to?” she demanded suspiciously. “Martian vases, indeed!”

  “Well, it’s not exactly a vase. It’s more of a—I’ll open it, Josh, you just stand back. This doesn’t concern you.”

  “Oh, Uncle Fred!” wailed Barbie, dancing up and down like a doll on strings. “Open it up, please open it up.”

  Matt had put the suitcase inside the door. Now he came and joined the others under the tree.

  Fred opened the lid of the box. Then he sat back on his heels, watching the children’s faces, and Matt thought, “He’s been waiting for this for nearly a year, dreaming it up…he should have married and had kids of his own.”

  Josh and Barbie let out one mingled cry, and then were still. For a moment.

  “Is it really alive?”

  “Can we touch it?”

  “Will it bite?”

  “Oh, Uncle Fred—oh, look—it does belong to us, doesn’t it?”

  Along the fence small boys and girls impaled their meager bellies on the pickets in an effort to see. Matt and Lucille peered down into the box. On a mat of red sand and dry lichens a thing was crouching, a neat furry thing about the size of a big rabbit and not unlike one in outline, except that its ears were cup-shaped, and except that its coat was mottled in the exact rust red and greenish gray of the native sand and lichens. It looked up at the unfamiliar faces with a sort of mild incuriosity, its eyes half shut against the glare, but otherwise it did not move.

  “What on earth is it?” asked Lucille.

  “Nothing,” said Fred, “on Earth. On Mars, he’s the dominant form of life—or was, until we came. In fact, he’s the sole surviving mammal, and almost the sole surviving vertebrate. He doesn’t have an official name yet. It’ll be years before the zoologists can decide on their classifications. But the boys out there call him tweener.”

  “What?” said Lucille.

  “Tweener. Because he’s sort of between things. You know—if anyone asked you what he was like, you’d say he was something between a rabbit and a ground-hog, or maybe between a monkey and a squirrel. Go ahead, Barbie, pick him up.”