The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  I made sure I still had my gun, and I did have. I wished I had a drink, but that was hopeless. So I started out. I didn’t go straight up the mountain. I figured the girl would have had time to find her brother and give him warning, and that he might be looking for me to come that way. I angled off to the east, where I remembered a ravine that might give me some cover. I’d been up Buckhorn before, but only by daylight, with snow on the ground and a couple of friends with me, and not looking for anything more sinister than a bear.

  I climbed the steep flank of the mountain, leaning almost into it, worming and floundering and pulling my way between the trees. The rain fell and soaked me. The thunder was a monstrous presence, and the lightning was a great torch that somebody kept tossing back and forth so that sometimes you could see every vein of every leaf on the tree you were fighting with, and sometimes it was so dark that you knew the sun and stars hadn’t been invented yet. I lost the ravine. I only knew I was still going up. There wasn’t any doubt about that. After a while the rain slacked off and almost stopped.

  In an interval between crashes of thunder I heard voices.

  They were thin and far away. I tried to place them, and when I thought I had them pegged I started toward them. The steep pitch of the ground fell away into a dizzying downslope and I was almost running into a sort of long shallow trough, thickly wooded, its bottom hidden from any view at all except one directly overhead. And there were lights in it, or at least a light.

  I slowed down and went more carefully, hoping the storm would cover any noise I made.

  The voices went on, and now I could hear another sound, the scrinch and screek of metal rubbing on metal.

  I was on the clearing before I knew it. And it wasn’t a clearing at all really, just one of those natural open places where the soil is too thin to support trees and runs to brush instead. It wasn’t much more than ten feet across. Almost beside me were a couple of tents so cleverly hidden among the trees that you practically had to fall on them, as I did, to find them at all.

  From one of them came the sleepy sobbing of a child.

  In the small clearing Vadi and Arnek were watching a jointed metal mast build itself up out of a pit in the ground. The top of it was already out of sight in the cloud but it was obviously taller than the trees. The lamp was on the ground beside the pit.

  The faces of Vadi and her brother were both angry, both set and obstinate. Perhaps it was their mutual fury that made them seem less human, or more unhuman, than ever, the odd bone-structure of cheek and jaw accentuated, the whole head elongated, the silver-red hair fairly bristling, the copper-colored eyes glinting with that unpleasantly catlike brilliance in the light. They had been quarreling, and they still were, but not in English. Arnek had a look like a rattlesnake.

  Vadi, I thought, was frightened. She kept glancing at the tents, and in a minute the big man, Marlin, came out of one of them. He was pressing a small bandage on the side of his head, over his ear. He looked tired and wet and foul-tempered, as though he had not had an easy time getting back to base.

  He started right in on Vadi, cursing her because of what she had done.

  Arnek said in English, “I didn’t ask her to come here, and I’m sending her home tonight.”

  “That’s great,” Marlin said. “That’s a big help. We’ll have to move our base anyway now.”

  “Maybe not,” said Arnek defiantly. He watched the slim mast stretching up and up with a soft screeking of its joints.

  “You’re a fool,” said Marlin, in a tone of cold and bitter contempt. “You started this mess, Arnek. You had to play around with that girl and make a kid to give the show away. Then you pull that half-cocked trick with those guys in the station wagon and you can’t even do that right. You kill the one but not the other. And then she louses up the only chance we got left. You know how much money we’re going to lose? You know how long it’ll take us to find a location half as good as this? You know what I ought to do?”

  Arnek’s voice was sharp, but a shade uncertain. “Oh, stop bitching and get onto those scanners. All we need is another hour and then they can whistle. And there are plenty of mountains.”

  “Are there,” said Marlin, and looked again at Vadi. “And how long do you think she’ll keep her mouth shut at your end?”

  He turned and walked back into the tent. Arnek looked uncertainly at Vadi and then fixed his attention on the mast again. Vadi’s face was the color of chalk. She started once toward the tent and Arnek caught her roughly and spoke to her in whatever language they used, and she stopped.

  I slid around the back of the tents to the one Marlin was in. There was a humming and whining inside. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled carefully over the wet grass between the tents, toward the front. The mast apparently made its last joint because it stopped and Arnek said something to Vadi and they bent over what seemed to be a sunken control box in the ground. I took my chance and whipped in through the tent flap.

  I didn’t have long to look around. The space inside was crammed with what seemed to be electronic equipment. Marlin was sitting hunched up on a stool in front of a big panel with a dozen or so little screens on it like miniature television monitors. The screens, I just had time to see, showed an assortment of views of Buckhorn and the surrounding areas, and Marlin was apparently, by remote control, rotating one by one the distant receivers that sent the images to the screens. They must have been remarkably tight-beamed, because they were not much disturbed by static. I knew now how the eye of God had watched Doc and me on Tunkhannock Ridge.

  I didn’t know yet how the lightning-bolts were hurled, but I was pretty sure Ed Betts would get one if his car showed up on a scanner screen, and who would be the wiser? Poor Ed hit by lightning just like old Doc, and weren’t the storms something fierce this summer?

  Marlin turned around and saw it wasn’t Arnek. He moved faster than I would have thought possible. He scooped up the light stool he was sitting on and threw it at me, leaping sideways himself in a continuation of the same movement. In the second in which I was getting my head out of the way of the stool he pulled a gun. He had had a spare, just as he must have had a car stashed somewhere in or near the town.

  He did not quite have time to fire. I shot him twice through the body. He dropped but I didn’t know if he was dead. I kicked the gun out of his hand and jumped to stand flat against the canvas wall beside the front flap, not pressing against it. The canvas was light-proof, and the small lamps over the control panels did not throw shadows.

  Arnek did not come in.

  After a second or two I got nervous. I could hear him shouting “Marlin! Marlin!” I ran into the narrow space behind the banks of equipment, being extremely careful how I touched anything. I did not see any power leads. It dawned on me that all this stuff had come up out of a pit in the ground like the mast and that the generator must be down there below. The floor wasn’t canvas at all, but some dark gray material to which the equipment was bolted.

  I got my knife out and started to slit the canvas at the back. And suddenly the inside of the tent was full of green fire. It sparked off every metal thing and jarred the gun out of my hand. It nearly knocked me out again. But I was shielded by the equipment from the full force of the shock. It flicked off again almost at once. I got the canvas cut and squirmed through it and then I put three or four shots at random into the back of the equipment just for luck.

  Then I raced around the front and caught Arnek just as he was deciding not to enter the tent after all.

  He had a weapon in his hand like the one Vadi had used on me. I said, “Drop it,” and he hesitated, looking evil and upset. “Drop it!” I told him again, and he dropped it. “Now stand away,” I said. “Walk out toward your sister, real slow, one step at a time.”

  He walked, and I picked up the weapon.

  “Good,” I said. “Now we can all relax.” And I called Sally Tate, telling her it was safe to come out now.

  All this time since I was
where I could see her Vadi had stood with one hand over her mouth, looking up into the mist.

  Sally Tate came out of the other tent. She was carrying the boy, and both their faces were pale and puffy-eyed and streaked with tears.

  “It’s all right now,” I said. “You can go—” I was going to say “home,” and then there was a sound in the sky that was not wind or thunder, that was hardly a sound at all, but more of a great sigh. The air pressed down on me and the grass was flattened as by a down-driven wind and all the branches of the trees bowed. The mist rolled, boiled, was rent, torn apart, scattered.

  Something had come to rest against the top of the mast.

  Arnek turned and ran to Vadi and I did not stop him. I moved closer to Sally Tate, standing with her mouth open and her eyes big and staring.

  The mast began to contract downward, bringing the thing with it.

  I suppose I knew then what the thing was. I just didn’t want to admit it. It was cylindrical and slender, about fifty feet long, with neither wings nor jets. I watched it come slowly and gracefully down, attached by its needle-sharp nose to the magnetic grapple on top of the mast. The mast acted as automatic guide and stabilizer, dropping the ship into a slot between the trees as neatly as you would drop a slice of bread into the slot of a toaster.

  And all the time the bitter breath of fear was blowing on me and little things were falling into place in my mind and I realized that I had known the answer for some time and had simply refused to see it.

  A port opened in the side of the ship. And as though that was the final symbolic trigger I needed, I got the full impact of what I was seeing. Suddenly the friendly protecting sky seemed to have been torn open above me as the veiling cloud was torn, and through the rent the whole Outside poured in upon me, the black freezing spaces of the galaxy, the blaze and strangeness of a billion billion suns. I shrank beneath that vastness. I was nothing, nobody, an infinitesimal fleck in a cosmos too huge to be borne. The stars had come too close. I wanted to get down and howl and grovel like a dog.

  No wonder Arnek and Vadi and the boy were queer. They were not mutants—they were not even that Earthly. They came from another world.

  A little ladder had extended itself downward from the port. A man came briskly to the ground and spoke to Arnek. He resembled Arnek except that he was dressed in a single close-fitting garment of some dark stuff. Arnek pointed to me, speaking rapidly. The man turned and looked at me, his body expressing alarm. I felt childish and silly standing there with my little gun. Lone man of Earth at an incredible Thermopylae, saying, “You shall not land.”

  All the time Arnek and the stranger had been talking there had been other activities around the ship. A hatch in the stern had opened and now from both hatches people began to come out helter-skelter as though haste was the chief necessity. There were men and women both. They all looked human. Slightly odd, a little queer perhaps, but human. They were different types, different colors, sizes, and builds, but they all fitted in somewhere pretty close to Earthly types. They all looked a little excited, a little scared, considerably bewildered by the place in which they found themselves. Some of the women were crying. There were maybe twenty people in all.

  I understood then exactly what Arnek and Marlin had been up to and it seemed so grotesquely familiar and prosaic that I began to laugh.

  “Wetbacks,” I said aloud. “That’s what you’re doing, smuggling aliens.”

  Aliens. Yes indeed.

  It did not seem so funny when I thought about it.

  The stranger turned around and shouted an order. The men and women stopped, some of them still on the ladders. More voices shouted. Then those on the ladders were shoved aside and eight men in uniform jumped out, with weapons in their hands.

  Sally Tate let go one wild wavering shriek. The child fell out of her arms. He sat on the wet ground with the wind knocked out of him so he couldn’t cry, blinking in shocked dismay. Sally tottered. Her big strong healthy body was sunken and collapsed, every muscle slack. She turned and made a staggering lunge for the tent and fell partly in through the doorway, crawled the rest of the way like a hurt dog going under a porch, and lay there with the flap pulled over her head.

  I didn’t blame her. I don’t even know what obscure force kept me from joining her.

  Of the eight men, five were not human. Two of them not even remotely.

  I can’t describe them. I can’t remember what they looked like, not clearly.

  Let’s be honest. I don’t want to remember.

  I suppose if you were used to things like that all your life it would be different. You wouldn’t think anything about it.

  I was not used to things like that. I knew that I never would be, not if we ourselves achieved space-flight tomorrow. I’m too old, too set in the familiar pattern of existence that has never been broken for man since the beginning. Perhaps others are more resilient. They’re welcome to it.

  I picked up the boy and ran.

  It came on again to rain. I ran down Buckhorn Mountain, carrying the boy in my arms. And the green lightning came after us, hunting us along the precipitous slope.

  The boy had got his breath back. He asked me why we had to die. I said never mind, and kept on running.

  I fell with him and rolled to the bottom of a deep gully. We were shaken. We lay in the dripping brush looking up at the lightning lancing across the night above us. After a while it stopped. I picked him up again and crept silently along the gully and onto the slope below.

  And nearly got shot by Ed Betts and a scratch posse, picking their cautious way up the mountainside.

  One of the men took the child out of my arms. I hung onto Ed and said inanely, “They’re landing a load of wetbacks.”

  “Up there?”

  “They’ve got a ship,” I told him. “They’re aliens, Ed. Real aliens.”

  I began to laugh again. I didn’t want to. It just seemed such a hellishly clever play on words that I couldn’t help it.

  Fire bloomed suddenly in the night above us. A second later the noise of the explosion reached us.

  I stopped laughing. “They must be destroying their installations. Pulling out. Marlin said they’d have to. Christ. And Sally is still up there.”

  I ran back up the mountain, clambering bearlike through the trees. The others followed.

  There was one more explosion. Then I came back to the edge of the clearing. Ed was close behind me. I don’t think any of the others were really close enough to see. There was a lot of smoke. The tents were gone. Smoking trees were slowly toppling in around the edges of a big raw crater in the ground. There was no trace of the instruments that had been in the tents.

  The ship was still there. The crew, human and unhuman, were shoving the last of the passengers back into the ship. There was an altercation going on beside the forward port.

  Vadi had her arm around Sally Tate. She was obviously trying to get her aboard. I thought I understood then why Sally and the boy were still alive. Probably Vadi had been insisting that her brother send them along where they wouldn’t be any danger to him, and he hadn’t quite had the nerve to cross her. He was looking uncertain now, and it was the officer who was making the refusal. Sally herself seemed to be in a stupor.

  Vadi thrust past the officer and led Sally toward the ladder. And Sally went, willingly. I like to remember that, now, when she’s gone.

  I think—I hope—that Sally’s all right out there. She was younger and simpler than I, she could adapt. I think she loved Bill Jones—Arnek—enough to leave her child, leave her family, leave her world, and still be happy near him.

  Ed and I started to run across the clearing. Ed had not said a word. But his face was something to look at.

  They saw us coming but they didn’t bother to shoot at us. They seemed in a tremendous hurry. Vadi screamed something, and I was sure it was in English and a warning to me, but I couldn’t understand it. Then she was gone inside the ship and so were Arnek and Sally and the offi
cer and crewmen, and the ladders went up and the ports shut.

  The mooring mast began to rise and so did the ship, and the trees were bent with the force of its rising.

  I knew then what the warning was.

  I grabbed Ed bodily and hauled him back. The ship didn’t have to be very high. Only above the trees. I hauled him as far as blind instinct told me I could go and then I yelled, “Get down! Get down!” to everybody within earshot and made frantic motions. It all took possibly thirty seconds. Ed understood and we flopped and hugged the ground.

  The mast blew.

  Dirt, rocks, pieces of tree rained down around us. The shock wave pounded our ears. A few moments later, derisive and powerful, a long thin whistling scream tore upward across the sky, and faded, and was gone.

  We got up after a while and collected the muddy and startled posse and went to look at what was left of the clearing. There was nothing. Sally Tate was gone as though she had never existed. There was no shred of anything left to prove that what Ed and I had seen was real.

  We made up a story, about a big helicopter and an alien racket. It wasn’t too good a story, but it was better than the truth. Afterward, when we were calmer, Ed and I tried to figure it out for ourselves. How it was done, I mean, and why.

  The “how” was easy enough, given the necessary technology. Pick a remote but not too inconveniently isolated spot, like the top of Buckhorn Mountain. Set up your secret installation—a simple one, so compact and carefully hidden that hunters could walk right over it and never guess it was there when it was not in use. On nights when conditions are right—that is to say, when the possibility of being observed is nearest to zero—run your cargo in and land it. We figured that the ship we saw wasn’t big enough to transport that many people very far. We figured it was a landing-craft, ferrying the passengers down from a much bigger mothership way beyond the sky.