The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  Jud, who had been sitting stiff and uncomfortable during the talking, jumped up and practically ran to the set. Mrs. Tate started to protest, but Ed said firmly, “This may be important, Mrs. Tate. Jud’s a good serviceman, he won’t upset anything.”

  “I hope not,” she said. “It does run real good.”

  Jud turned it on and watched it for a minute. “It sure does,” he said. “And in this location, too.”

  He took the back off and looked inside. After a minute he let go a long low whistle.

  “What is it?” said Ed, going closer.

  “Damnedest thing,” said Jud. “Look at that wiring. He’s loused up the circuits, all right—and there’s a couple tubes in there like I never saw before.” He was getting excited. “I’d have to tear the whole thing down to see what he’s really done, but somehow he’s boosted the power and the sensitivity way up. The guy must be a wizard.”

  Mrs. Tate said loudly, “You ain’t tearing anything down, young man. You just leave it like it is.”

  I said, “What about that dingus on the side?”

  “Frankly,” said Jud, “that stops me. It’s got a wire to it, but it don’t seem to hitch up anywhere in the set.” He turned the set off and began to poke gently around. “See here, this little hairline wire that comes down and bypasses the whole chassis? It cuts in here on the live line, so it draws power whether the set’s on or not. But I don’t see how it can have anything to do with the set operating.”

  “Well, take it out,” said Ed. “We’ll take it down to the shop and see whether we can make anything of it.”

  “Okay,” said Jud, ignoring Mrs. Tate’s cry of protest. He reached in and for the first time actually touched the enigmatic little unit, feeling for what held it to the side of the case.

  There was a sharp pop and a small bright flare, and Jud leaped back with a howl. He put his scorched fingers in his mouth and his eyes watered. Mrs. Tate cried, “Now, you’ve done it, you’ve ruined my teevee!” There was a smell of burning on the air. The girls came running out of the kitchen and the old dog barked and clawed the screen.

  One of the girls said, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Jud said. “The goddamned thing just popped like a bomb when I touched it.”

  There was a drift of something gray—ash or dust—and that was all. Even the hairline wire was consumed.

  “It looks,” I said, “as though Mr. Jones didn’t want anybody else to look over his technological achievements.”

  Ed grunted. He looked puzzled and irresolute. “Hurt the set any?” he asked.

  “Dunno,” said Jud, and turned it on.

  It ran as perfectly as before.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Tate, “thank goodness.”

  “Yeah,” said Ed. “I guess that’s all, then. What do you say, Hank? We might as well go.”

  I said we might as well. We climbed back into Ed’s car and started—the second time for me—back down Tunkhannock Ridge.

  Jud was still sucking his fingers. He wondered out loud if the funny-looking tubes in the set would explode the same way if you touched them, and I said probably. Ed didn’t say anything. He was frowning deeply. I asked him what he thought about it.

  “I’m trying to figure the angle,” he said. “This Bill Jones. What does he get out of it? What does he make? On the television gag, I mean. People usually want to get paid for work like that.”

  Jud offered the opinion that the man was a nut. “One of these crazy guys like in the movies, always inventing things that make trouble. But I sure would like to know what he done to that set.”

  “Well,” said Ed, “I can’t see what more we can do. He did come back for the girl, and apart from that he hasn’t broken any laws.”

  “Hasn’t he?” I said, looking out the window. We were coming to the place where Doc had died. There was no sign of a storm today. Everything was bright, serene, peaceful. But I could feel the cold feeling of being watched. Someone, somewhere, knew me. He watched where I went and what I did, and decided whether or not to send the green lightning to slay me. It was a revelation, like the moments you have as a young child when you become acutely conscious of God. I began to shake. I wanted to crawl down in the back seat and hide. Instead I sat where I was and tried to keep the naked terror from showing too much. And I watched the sky. And nothing happened.

  Ed Betts didn’t mention it, but he began to drive faster and faster until I thought we weren’t going to need any green lightning. He didn’t slow down until we hit the valley. I think he would have been glad to get rid of me, but he had to haul me all the way back up Coat Hill to get my car. When he did let me off, he said gruffly, “I’m not going to listen to you again till you’ve had a good twelve hours’ sleep. And I need some myself. So long.”

  I went home, but I didn’t sleep. Not right away. I told my assistant and right-hand man, Joe Streckfoos, that the paper was all his today, and then I got on the phone. I drove the local exchange crazy, but by about five o’clock that afternoon I had the information I wanted.

  I had started with a map of the area on my desk. Not just Newhale, but the whole area, with Buckhorn Mountain roughly at the center and showing the hills and valleys around its northern periphery. By five o’clock the map showed a series of red pencil dots. If you connected them together with a line they formed a sprawling, irregular, but unbroken circle drawn around Buckhorn, never exceeding a certain number of miles in distance from the peak.

  Every pencil dot represented a television set that had within the last three years been serviced by a red-haired man—for free.

  I looked at the map for a long time, and then I went out in the yard and looked up at Buckhorn. It seemed to me to stand very high, higher than I remembered. From flank to crest the green unbroken forest covered it. In the winter time men hunted there for bear and deer, and I knew there were a few hunting lodges, hardly more than shacks, on its lower slopes. These were not used in summer, and apart from the hunters no one ever bothered to climb those almost perpendicular sides, hanging onto the trees as onto a ladder, up to the fog and storm that plagued the summit.

  There were clouds there now. It almost seemed that Buckhorn pulled them down over his head like a cowl, until the gray trailing edges hid him almost to his feet. I shivered and went inside and shut the door. I cleaned my automatic and put in a full clip. I made a sandwich and drank the last couple of drinks in last night’s bottle. I laid out my boots and my rough-country pants and a khaki shirt. I set the alarm. It was still broad daylight. I went to bed.

  The alarm woke me at eleven-thirty. I did not turn on any lamps. I don’t know why, except that I still had that naked feeling of being watched. Light enough came to me anyhow from the intermittent sulfurous flares in the sky. There was a low mutter of thunder in the west. I put the automatic in a shoulder holster under my shirt, not to hide it but because it was out of the way there. When I was dressed I went downstairs and out the back door, heading for the garage.

  It was quiet, the way a little town can be quiet at night. I could hear the stream going over the stones, and the million little songs of the crickets, the peepers, and the frogs were almost stridently loud.

  Then they began to stop. The frogs first, in the marshy places beside the creek. Then the crickets and the peepers. I stopped too, in the black dark beside a clump of rhododendrons my mother used to be almost tiresomely proud of. My skin turned cold and the hair bristled on the back of my neck and I heard soft padding footsteps and softer breathing on the heavy air.

  Two people had waded the creek and come up into my yard.

  There was a flare and a grumble in the sky and I saw them close by, standing on the grass, looking up at the unlighted house.

  One of them was the girl Vadi, and she carried something in her hands. The other was the heavy-set dark man with the gun.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “He’s sleeping. Get busy.”

  I slid the automatic into my palm and open
ed my mouth to speak, and then I heard her say:

  “You won’t give him a chance to get out?”

  Her tone said she knew the answer to that one before she asked it. But he said with furious sarcasm:

  “Why certainly, and then you can call the sheriff and explain why you burned the house down. And the hospital. Christ. I told Arnek you weren’t to be trusted.” He gave her a rough shove. “Get with it.”

  Vadi walked five careful paces away from him. Then very swiftly she threw away, in two different directions, whatever it was she carried. I heard the two things fall, rustling among grass and branches where it might take hours to find them even by daylight. She spun around. “Now,” she said in a harsh defiant voice, “what are you going to do?”

  There was a moment of absolute silence, so full of murder that the far-off lightning seemed feeble by comparison. Then he said:

  “All right, let’s get out of here.”

  She moved to join him, and he waited until she was quite close to him. Then he hit her. She made a small bleating sound and fell down. He started to kick her, and then I jumped out and hit him over the ear with the flat of the automatic. It was his turn to fall down.

  Vadi got up on her hands and knees. She stared at me, sobbing a little with rage and pain. Blood was running from the corner of her mouth. I took the man’s gun and threw it far off and it splashed in the creek. Then I got down beside the girl.

  “Here,” I said. “Have my handkerchief.”

  She took it and held it to her mouth. “You were outside here all the time,” she said. She sounded almost angry.

  “It just happened that way. I still owe you thanks for my life. And my house. Though you weren’t so tender about the hospital.”

  “There was no one to be killed there. I made sure. A building one can always rebuild, but a life is different.”

  She looked at the unconscious man. Her eyes burned with that catlike brilliance in the lightning flares.

  “I could kill him,” she said, “with pleasure.”

  “Who is he?”

  “My brother’s partner.” She glanced toward Buckhorn and the light went out of her eyes. Her head became bowed.

  “Your brother sent you to kill me?”

  “He didn’t say—”

  “But you knew.”

  “When Marlin came with me I knew.”

  She had begun to tremble.

  “Do you make a career of arson?”

  “Arson? Oh. The setting of fires. No. I am a chemist. And I wish I—”

  She caught herself fiercely and would not finish.

  I said, “Those things are listening devices, then.”

  She had to ask me what I meant. Her mind was busy with some thorny darkness of its own.

  “The little gadgets your brother put in the television sets,” I said. “I figured that’s what they were when I saw how they were placed. A string of sentry posts all around the center of operations, little ears to catch every word of gossip, because if any of the local people get suspicious they’re bound to talk about it and so give warning. He heard my calls this afternoon, didn’t he? That’s why he sent you. And he heard Doc and me at the Tales’. That’s why—”

  Moving with that uncanny swiftness of hers, she rose and ran away from me. It was like before. She ran fast, and I ran after her. She went splashing through the shallow stream and the water flew back against me, wetting my face, spattering my clothes. On the far bank I caught her, as I had before. But this time she fought me.

  “Let me go,” she said, and beat her hands against me. “Do you know what I’ve done for you? I’ve asked for the knife for myself. Let me go, you clumsy fool—”

  I held her tighter. Her soft curls pressed against my cheek. Her body strove against me, and it was not soft but excitingly strong.

  “—before I regret it,” she said, and I kissed her.

  It was strange, what happened then.

  I’ve kissed girls who didn’t want to be kissed, and I’ve kissed girls who didn’t like me particularly. I’ve kissed a couple of the touch-me-not kind who shrink from any sort of physical contact. I’ve had my face slapped. But I never had a girl withdraw from me the way she did. It was like something closing, folding up, shutting every avenue of contact, and yet she never moved. In fact she had stopped moving entirely. She just stood with my arms around her and my lips on hers, and kind of a coldness came out of her, a rejection so total I couldn’t even get mad. I was shocked, and very much puzzled, but you can’t get mad at a thing that isn’t personal. This was too deep for that. And suddenly I thought of the boy.

  “A different breed,” I said. “Worlds apart. Is that it?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Worlds apart.”

  And the coldness spread through me. I stood on the bank of the stream in the warm night, the bank where I had stood ten thousand times before, boy and man, and saw the strange shining of her eyes, and I was more than cold, I was afraid. I stepped back away from her, still holding her but in a different way.

  “It wasn’t like this,” I said, “between your brother and Sally Tate.”

  The girl-thing said, “My brother Arnek is a corrupt man.”

  “Vadi,” I said. “Where is Hrylliannu?”

  The girl-thing looked past my shoulder and said, “Marlin is running away.”

  I looked too, and it was so. The big man’s head was harder than I had thought. He had got up, and I saw him blundering rapidly away along the side of my house, heading for the street.

  “Well,” I said, “he’s gone now. You must have come in a car, didn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “It won’t be challenged as soon as mine. We’ll take it.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked, catching her breath sharply.

  “Where I was going when you stopped me. Up Buckhorn.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “No, you can’t, you mustn’t.” She was human again, and afraid. “I saved your life, isn’t that enough for you? You’ll never live to climb Buckhorn and neither will I if—”

  “Did Sally and the boy live to climb it?” I asked her, and she hung her head and nodded. “Then you’ll see to it that we do.”

  “But tonight!” she said in a panic. “Not tonight!”

  “What’s so special about tonight?” She didn’t answer, and I shook her. “What’s going on up there?”

  She didn’t answer that, either. She said with sudden fierceness, “All right, then, come on. Climb Buckhorn and see. And when you’re dying, remember that I tried to stop you.”

  She didn’t speak again. She led me without protest to the car parked on the dirt road. It was a panel truck. By day it would have been a dirty blue.

  “He’s going to kill them, isn’t he?” I said. “He killed Doc. You admit he wants to kill me. What’s going to save Sally and the child?”

  “You torture me,” she said. “This is a world of torture. Go on. Go on, and get it done.”

  I started the panel truck. Like the television set, it worked better than it had any business to. It fled with uncanny strength and swiftness over the dirt roads toward Buckhorn, soft-sprung as a cloud, silent as a dream.

  “It’s a pity,” I said. “Your brother has considerable genius.”

  She laughed. A bitter laugh. “He couldn’t pass his second year of technical training. That’s why he’s here.”

  She looked at Buckhorn as though she hated the mountain, and Buckhorn, invisible behind a curtain of storm, answered her look with a sullen curse, spoken in thunder.

  I stopped at the last gas station on the road and honked the owner out of bed and told him to call Sheriff Betts and tell him where I’d gone. I didn’t dare do it myself for fear Vadi would get away from me. The man was very resentful about being waked up. I hoped he would not take out his resentment by forgetting to call.

  “You’re pretty close to Buckhorn,” I told him. “The neck you save may be your own.”

&nb
sp; I left him to ponder that, racing on toward the dark mountain in that damned queer car that made me feel like a character in one of my own bad dreams, with the girl beside me—the damned queer girl who was not quite human.

  The road dropped behind us. We began to climb the knees of the mountain. Vadi told me where to turn, and the road became a track, and the track ended in the thick woods beside a rickety little lodge the size of a piano-box, with a garage behind it. The garage only looked rickety. The headlights showed up new and sturdy timbers on the inside.

  I cut the motor and the lights and reached for the handbrake. Vadi must have been set on a hair-trigger waiting for that moment. I heard her move and there was a snap as though she had pulled something from a clip underneath the dashboard. The door on her side banged open.

  I shouted to her to stop and sprang out of the truck to catch her. But she was already out of the garage, and she was waiting for me. Just as I came through the door there was a bolt of lightning, bright green, small and close at hand. I saw it coming. I saw her dimly in the backflash and knew that in some way she had made the lightning with a thing she held in her hand. Then it hit me and that was all.

  When I came to I was all alone and the rain was falling on me just the way it had on Doc…

  But I wasn’t dead.

  I crawled around and finally managed to get up, feeling heavy and disjointed. My legs and arms flopped around as though the coordinating controls had been burned out. I stood inside the garage out of the rain, rubbing my numb joints and thinking.

  All the steam had gone out of me. I didn’t want to climb Buckhorn Mountain any more. It looked awfully black up there, and awfully lonesome, and God alone knew what was going on under the veil of cloud and storm that hid it. The lightning flashes—real sky-made lightning—showed me the dripping trees going right up into nothing, with the wind thrashing them, and then the following thunder cracked my eardrums. The rain hissed, and I thought, it’s crazy for one man to go up there alone.

  Then I thought about Sally Tate and the little red-headed kid, and I thought how Ed Betts might already be up there somewhere, plowing his way through the woods looking for me. I didn’t know how long I’d been out.