“Company!” he chortled happily to himself as he tottered down the winding stairs that led to his chambers. “After all these years, real live company!”
Trembling with haste—and something else—he took his musty dinner clothes out of a great oak chest. A few minutes later he was ready, immaculately attired, a multicolored ribbon—signifying the highest decoration of the Austrian Empire—diagonally across the gleaming white of his shirt front. The little rosette of the French Legion of Honor shone modestly in one lapel.
By the time the ground around the strange ship outside had cooled enough to let its occupants emerge, the great hall was a blaze of light from hastily lighted tapers. A new fire crackled in the fireplace, and the long banquet table had been dusted and stood gleaming in the candlelight. The last of his cellar, a single cobwebbed bottle, had been carefully placed on the table. With one last glance to assure himself that everything was at its best, he hobbled to the entrance and waited, the perfect image of a gracious host.
He felt a momentary pang of disappointment when he saw only one figure emerge from the ship, but then shrugged philosophically. He, of all people, was in no position to complain over the magnitude of windfalls. At least this night, for the first time in more years than he cared to think about, he would dine as a gentleman should.
WHEN she stepped into the candlelight, he gave a little purr of satisfaction. No thick bodied peasant this, but a patrician, an aristocrat of the first order. He stepped out of the shadows and gave a courtly bow.
“You are welcome, my dear. What little my poor house has to offer is yours.”
Her response marked her as a thoroughbred. When she turned slowly to face him there was no fright, no confusion.
“How strange,” she murmured. “How very, very strange. The scouts claimed to have detected night movements, but it was hard to believe. Are there more of you?”
“No, my dear,” said Count Shirov sadly. “I’m the last, the very last of all my kind. But to have such a lovely thing as you to brighten my dwelling makes the years of loneliness a mere nothing.”
“You are too kind,” she said absently, her eyes sweeping the ruined hall as if they were looking for hidden men in dark corners. Suits of ancestral armor still stood in glass fronted cases, but part of the roof had fallen in and the great doors hung on broken hinges.
“Amusing artifacts,” she said. “It might be interesting to preserve this place as a museum.”
“Now it is you who are beings too kind,” said the Count, as he ushered her toward two chairs that had been placed very close together at one end of the banquet table. “But I am being remiss in my duties as a host. A glass of wine, perhaps? I can vouch for its excellence.”
“I don’t drink,” she said.
“A pity,” sighed the Count. “Wine and beauty belong together. But at least be kind enough to grant an old man just a sip of both.”
Before she could protest, he eased her into one of the chairs, and seated himself beside her. He poured a crystal goblet half full of bubbling blood-red fluid, and held it up so it caught the light from the tapers. As he twisted the glass, brilliant little crimson flashes coruscated from it.
“Isn’t it beautiful, my dear?” he murmured, and tilted the goblet slightly so the dancing light flecks caught her full in the eyes.
“So beautiful, so very, very beautiful.” As his voice crooned-on it became softer and softer, until it was barely audible. “So much beauty that it seems impossible to take your eyes away from it. It fills them with little wavelets of shimmering light and makes you drowsy, so drowsy that even the sparklets begin to dim away because you are so terribly sleepy sleepy sleepy.
His voice-trailed off into silence, and slowly he began to bend toward her, his own eyes dazzled by the whiteness of her neck. And then a wave of. blind hunger that he was powerless to resist swirled over him. His lips curled back to expose two incisors that were, more like fangs than teeth. With a sudden animal-like snarl, he snapped at her jugular vein.
UNDER ordinary circumstances the Count would not have acted so precipitously—he had always prided himself on the delicacy of his dining—but these were by no means ordinary circumstances. After long famine, greediness, if not excused, can at least be condoned.
During the time of the fleeing men, he had eaten so well that for the first time in his life he had begun to acquire a slight paunch. What they were fleeing from didn’t arouse his curiosity—he was long accustomed to the periodic waves of madness that had been sweeping through the Balkans for as-long as he could remember.
The flight was toward the west, so. it might be from the Turks. The Count didn’t mind. He had always rather enjoyed the Ottoman invasions. Their half-starved fighting men were much too gamey for his taste-but the bashas—ah, the bashas!
But then one night came the first of the green clouds, small puffs of glittering light-points that moved, as if they had an intelligence of their own. And then more, ever more, darting through the passes and up over the mountain meadows, searching, ever searching until they found what they were hunting for. Then_ there were swift swooping dives and a clustering on twitching two-legged or four-legged things. When they left to hunt again the vultures came, and after them the rats and crawling things.
And then the green clouds themselves were gone. Whether they died, or ran out of fuel, or just evaporated, Count Shirov didn’t know—and, didn’t care. By then he was too hungry.
Something had happened to the balance of things. There were more lichens and toadstools than there were honest grasses, and leaves crinkled and grew brown before their time. Soon there was little left for decent greenness except long streamers of Spanish moss hanging from the dying trees.
The Count didn’t adjust to the new order without protest. There had been a time when only the blood of the most beautiful of village virgins had been considered suitable for the breaking of his fast. Now he was reduced to vultures—not without a great deal of initial gagging, however.
More than disgust was present. There, was also pain. Vultures have an unfortunate predilection for perching side by side on the highest branches available come nightfall, and neither the Count’s dignity, nor his aging muscles, were equal to the laborious task of climbing up after them. As a result, night after night he was forced to go through an agonizing metamorphosis and sweep through the night air on black bat wings to were his breakfast slumbered.
Popular tradition to the contrary, changing form is an agonizing process. There is a melting and a twisting and a shoving, a compressing of delicate nerve endings that is so painful that, except for an initial trying of his powers when he was young, and one or two emergency escapes from angry Transylvanian villagers, the Count had been content to keep his normal shape through the centuries. Now he had no choice but to put himself on the rack twice nightly.
Unfortunately for him, however, although he could survive on a, diet of vulture blood, they couldn’t keep alive without adequate rations of carrion. When the harvest left behind by the green clouds had all been gathered, there was nothing left for the naked-necked scavengers. They grew wan and thin, bundles of feathers stretched tight on sticklike bones. And then there were none.
The Count almost starved again before he learned to look under rocks. The many-legged things still bred and flourished—but it took so many of them, and the stones were so very heavy.
And now.
SHE DIDN’T move as he struck. Already savoring the richness of the hot arterial blood, he snapped expertly. The results weren’t quite what he’d expected. A sudden wrenching pain stabbed through his mouth, and then he found himself hurled to the floor. He sprawled for a moment, half stunned, and then, shaking his head to clear it, he pulled himself to his hands and knees and looked up at the girl, who was standing over him like an angry goddess.
“You lout,” she hissed, “You’ve chipped my enamel!”
He pulled himself groggily to his feet and looked. Sure enough, where his teeth had raked
the adamantine surface of her neck, bright metal showed through scratches in the flesh-colored covering.
In spite of his loosened teeth and aching jaws, Count Shirov remained the gentleman.
“A thousand pardons, my lady,” he said. “I didn’t dream that such beauty could be counterfeit. Surely you can’t blame a poor old half-blind man for failing to penetrate such a perfect disguise.”
“I can and I do!” she said angrily. “If one of the Masters had come upon you before I did, you might have injured him seriously.”
She drew a long rod-like mechanism from the loose folds of her tunic, and pointed it at the Count.
“How you managed to escape the exterminators, I don’t know,” she said. “But be that as it may, your end is overdue.”
“Perhaps these exterminators didn’t have the right equipment,” said the Count, shrugging politely.
“Nonsense!” she said sharply. “The plans were too carefully drawn. Every major life form on this planet was taken into account.” Her eyes narrowed. “But this one small-oversight can easily be rectified.”
“As you will,” said the Count. “I have lived so long already that death is a meaningless term to me. But wouldn’t you have the kindness to let me finish one last glass of this most excellent and irreplaceable wine?”
She nodded impatiently. “But be quick about it. The Masters will soon be here. It will be fitting that the place which marks the last of the old shall also mark the first of the new.”
The Count sipped his wine slowly.
“Tell me,” he said, “the Masters, are they all like you?”
She seemed shocked at the thought.
“Of course not! I am a Servant, a machine built to do their will. I was one of those specially prepared to come in advance to clear this planet of all forms of noxious life, so that it could become a fit dwelling place for them. Now that that has been done except for you—the Masters have been summoned. Their ships are outside atmosphere now, waiting for sunrise so that they can land.”
COUNT SHIROV looked down into his glass. There was one sip of wine left.
“My lady,” he said humbly, “it has long been a custom of this planet to give a condemned man a final wish.”
“We are not bound by your customs,” she said coldly.
“I know, but this is such a little thing, an old man’s whim. Wouldn’t it be possible just to look at one of the new masters before I die?”
“Impossible! It is still an hour before sunrise, and I must remove you before then.”
“But if just one ship could land ahead of time.”
She gave a scornful laugh. “Don’t be absurd. You know that it is impossible for the Masters to . . . But of course you couldn’t. You would have no way to.”
“To what?” asked the Count, letting a note of genteel curiosity slip into his voice.
“I am conditioned against giving that information,” she said primly. Keeping the rod-shaped weapon pointed at him, she looked around the hall again.
“Where does that lead to?” she asked, gesturing toward a shadowed archway in the far corner.
“To the cellars, my dear.”
“That will be as good a place as any,” she said, and pointed toward it with her weapon.
Count Shirov rose to his feet and lifted his glass.
“To man’s past,” he said softly, “and the Master’s future.” Draining the last swallow of wine, he crashed the goblet into the fireplace.
“Your servant, my lady. If it must be done, do it quickly. Dawn is not too far away and I am allergic to sunlight.”
As he walked toward the vaulted stairway he seemed more a gallant ushering his lady to her opera box than a condemned man being led to his death. He paused at the entrance and looked at her enquiringly.
“Keep going!” she snapped.
He bowed and disappeared into the darkness.
She waited until the sound of his descending footsteps had almost disappeared, and then pressed a stud on her long rod-like weapon. There was a soft hiss, and from the tip a green cloud of tiny light-points appeared. It circled for a moment as if picking up a scent, and then darted down the stairway after Count Shirov.
It was bright morning outside, and the first thundering of the descending ships of the Masters could be heard, by the time she descended into the crypt. For a moment she thought he had escaped, but then she found him. He was dead. She knew the signs. Satisfied, she dropped the lid on the long black box and climbed the winding steps back up into the great hall.
Her mission completed, the last of the Servants pressed a button concealed in her navel and permanently deactivated herself.
KAR KLEN, the royal physician, looked nervously out the window. The sun had almost dropped behind the peaks, and his quarters were all the way across the central square.
“You aren’t listening to me,” said a complaining voice.
“Oh, I am, my lady, I am! I was just trying to decide which of my many remedies would best combat this strange sickness of yours.”
“You’d better come up with the right one this time,” grated the Princess Royal, “or this court is going to have to get along without your services. And,” she added, clicking her mandibles noisely, “the Queen Mother is going to have a new week husband. I’m sick and tired of waking up every morning so exhausted that I’m barely able to crawl out of my web.”
A green globule of nervous perspiration oozed from Kar Klen’s ventral pore.
“This time I’m certain to find the remedy, my lady,” he said and began to back toward the door. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, the shadows are already long. If I don’t hurry The Sleep will catch me on the square. I will wait upon your ladyship the first thing in the morning.”
“You will not!” she snapped. “You’ll keep right on working here until you’ve compounded my medicine for me. I’ll have a servant with a sleep-dispeller light you home when you’re through.”
“Yes, my lady,” said Kar Klen in unhappy submission, and opened up the case containing his pills and purges. As it darkened outside he began to yawn in spite of himself.
“Turn on the lights, you fool,” growled the princess. “The Sleep is almost on us.”
Kar Klen clicked a light switch and overhead a great bank of sleep-dispelling ultra-violet lamps filled the room with their protective radiations. Turning back to his case, he looked at bottle after bottle, in a desperate search for the remedy that would cure the Princess of her persistent anemia, and save him from the hatching pens. But since vampires were unknown on Alpha Centauri, he never thought of looking in the obvious place, an ancient crypt beneath a ruined castle. There the last earthman slumbered through the bright sunlit hours, a happy smile on his full red lips, and his aristocratic hands folded over a small but nicely rounded paunch.
BARRIER
Naturally, occupying the first manned rockets into space will be a man’s job . . .
MIKE SAID, “I’m moving her out another ten.”
“Check.” The small red-headed physiologist didn’t look up from the long row of indicators.
The red needle on the altimeter swung slowly to the right as the range-finders tracked the rising rocket. Mike made a quick adjustment on the control board and then leaned back in his chair and fished out a cigarette. “Let me know when you’ve finished checking your little beasties and I’ll move her out again.”
The physiologist nodded and went on checking the wavy lines the styluses were inking on the slowly-revolving recording drums. There were fifty recorders in the control center, one for each of the laboratory animals carried in the remote-controlled rocket. Without conscious thought, trained eyes translated each of the inked lines into respiration-rate, pulse-rate, blood-pressure—into each of the score of items that described how the living organisms that were in free fall two hundred miles above were reacting to their new environment.
As the last entry was made in the log, the physiologist relaxed a bit. “Hey, Mike, light me a c
igarette and toss it over. I think we’d better give the animals a five minute rest before we start them out again.”
“Catch!” With a quick flick of his middle finger he sent a lighted cigarette arcing toward the red-head. A thin arm reached out with catlike quickness and picked it out of the air.
“You’ve got good reflexes,” Mike said; “you’re faster than most men.”
The other took a long slow drag on the cigarette before answering. “Fast—but not fast enough, eh?”
“What?”
“You know what I mean.”
He looked slightly uncomfortable. “It isn’t that. You’re as quick as any of the men that are being sent out—and as smart, too. It’s just that . . .”
He didn’t get a chance to finish. “I know. I’m fast enough; I’m smart enough. I’m little, so that it would only take two-thirds as much food, oxygen, and water to keep me going. It’s just that I’m a woman.” She made no effort to conceal the bitterness that was in her. “It’s all right for me to help out with the testing but when it comes to the big jump-off, I’m supposed to retire to the grandstands and wave my handkerchief to cheer our departing heroes.”
“I didn’t make the decision,” he said defensively.
“But you agree with it, don’t you?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Don’t you?”
He pretended to busy himself with his instruments. “You’ll have your chance later,” he said finally.
“As a passenger once the rough work is all done and the space lines start running? No thanks!” She threw the butt of her cigarette down on the floor and ground it viciously under one heel. “It’s easy for you to talk, you’re going.”
Collected Fiction Page 21
