by Fritz Leiber
“Is that how they spotted you at the Zodiac,” I interjected, “when you flashed that Mercury gold piece.”
“Of course,” she said. “I thought they were three Jupiter men and we could play the old game we always do right under the eyes of you terrestrials. The Zodiac was supposed to be Jovian still, although most of the other casinos are Solarian now. In fact, there’s a big interplanetary conference scheduled for the Zodiac day after tomorrow. I’m on the Mercurian delegation, but I’d gone up early to play roulette.
“But as soon as those three hulking bastards (whom I’d taken for Jovians) refused to honor my bet (you know it wasn’t late!) and I saw the diamond glint in their eyes, I knew they were Solarians and that I’d have to get back south and warn my people before the whole conference was ambushed and wiped out (their obvious intention) but I also knew that they knew and would do their damnedest to stop me!”
“But if the Sun men have as little regard for rule as you say,” I objected, “why didn’t they kidnap you or (excuse me) rub you out while you were still at the Zodiac where they’re top dogs?”
“Even the Sun men can’t afford to do anything that openly inside the Zodiac with all you square around. Besides, they did try to burn me in my car (they’re great at burning cars) right in the parking lot, only I fooled them into thinking my car was another that looked just like mine. And it worked. When I got outside the Vegas city limits I looked back and could see it burning.”
“But why couldn’t you have warned your people simply by telephone or special short-wave radio or something?” I asked.
“My God, you must think we are really stupid if you think we’d ever go around breaking cover like that,” she fumed at me, subsiding. “Short-wave radio!”
“Or couldn’t you just use telepathy?” I persisted, “—you being so astrological and occult and all?”
“For your information, the planet people do not happen to be telepathic,” she informed me and lapsed into an offended silence, only shifting position from time to time to look behind us.
We went through Kingman, which seemed all asleep, and then east on National Interstate 40 for a bit, where we met some cars and were passed by a couple, and then south on U.S. 93 again for another lonely, long, quite straight flat stretch along the Sandy River between the Mualapai Mountains on her side and the Aquarius Mountains on mine. I mentioned the last to her.
“I told you we were in the heart of Astrological Territory,” she said shortly.
The long, rather slight curves in the road were all marked with little round reflectors that were born like little yellow stars at the first touch of Dunkirk’s headlights beam, or like tiny rockets born on their blasting pads that did not move at first, then slowly toward us, and then took off swiftly as we passed them by. I got my timeless-intelligence kick again and thought of worn fellahin fingers patiently teasing apart with cracked dry fingernails the sheets of yellowish mica to make the reflectors.
I saw a new star, as bright as Sirius, on the horizon ahead. Then it winked out. After quite a bit it flashed on again, somewhat brighter, then off again, then on again, brighter still, and came on steadily. I’d just decided (with some amazement) it was the headlight of an approaching motorcycle, when it divided into two and I realized it was the headlights of a car, but first seen so far away through the incredibly clear desert air that they merged into one. The first bright flash must have come when we were aimed exactly at each other from the tops of almost imperceptible hills many miles apart. That really seemed quite amazing to me, worth commenting on.
My sulking (or merely sleepy?) companion appeared to digest the information I gave her and then remarked in rather lofty tones (and somewhat repetitiously), “For your information, I have been observing the same phenomenon behind us. There appears to be a car hanging on there a few miles back.” She subsided.
“And?” I said.
“Its merged headlights have a peculiar diamond glint, to my eye.”
“And?” I persisted.
“The Solarians do not give up easily,” she observed dispassionately.
“You think some people from the Zodiac are chasing us?” I asked.
She shrugged, somewhat elaborately.
A diamond glint?—I thought with a little shiver that surprised me. But the merged headlights of that approaching car I’d watched had been startlingly bright, too, and the same thing could work in the opposite direction, surely.
Nevertheless after a half minute or so, I speeded up. It was getting a bit less hot anyway and I no longer needed to hold Dunkirk down so much.
Twice more I saw horizon stars ahead that changed to cars.
My companion looked back from time to time, but didn’t offer any information as to whether we’d shaken the car behind and I didn’t ask her.
My science-fiction mind dredged up something that seemed worth repeating.
“If you were out on Pluto, the sun would be just a point of light like any other star, and yet it would be many, many times brighter than the whole full moon. A single point of light, but painfully intense. That sounds to me quite like your diamond glint.”
“Um,” she said in recognition of my speaking. If I’d scared anyone, it was myself. I lit a cigarette and offered her one and she took it. Lighting it off a match from a book of them she had tucked in her hair, she bent close to the dashboard and saw “Dunkirk” taped there. I told her it was the car’s name and she asked me why.
I said, “Because I figure I can always depend on her to get me out of really desperate situations.”
“You know, I’m relieved to hear that,” she said shortly.
I saw her point. We both smoked quite a bit off and on after that, and didn’t talk much. We both had, I think, that sense of shared monotony and watchfulness that comes with any long drive, but intensified here by the heat and the loneliness and the dark and whatever it was that hung behind us and we weren’t talking about so much any more. Darting fantasy had given way to a sort of wakeful trance.
We passed through Wikieup, a sort of ghost place in the small hours, and then through Wickenburg, somewhat bigger, the Date Creek Mountains on my side now and the Vulture Mountains on hers. The last of Wickenburg’s lights, industrial, showed me a forest of Joshua trees. The tall, twisted cactuses reminded me of something on a moon of Saturn and I told her so.
She said “Um” again and, after a bit, “The Saturnians are the oldest planet people. Very conservative. They’re on our side.”
Sometimes I was very conscious of her long slim youthfulness, but sometimes as she leaned back in the shadows I got the impression that she was ages old, desiccated by the centuries, the slender mummy of an ancient princess.
The desert gave way to scattered dark settlements and then I saw great openwork towers covered with colored lights.
“My God,” I said, startled for a moment, “It almost looks as if we were back on the Vegas Strip again.”
“No,” she said, “they’re cracking plants for petroleum, not casinos.” (I’d realized that by then.) She added, “The planet people—Martians especially—had a lot to do with determining the form of both sets of structures.”
“There’s no accounting for tastes,” I said, shaking my head. “Perhaps they’re supposed to resemble space-to-space vehicles.”
Soon we were into Phoenix, quiet a couple of hours or so before the dawn. I stopped at a sleepy station to top off Dunkirk’s tank again, add water and a pint of oil, and get us two cups of coffee apiece out of a machine (she vetoed breakfast and I didn’t argue). She drank her coffee thirstily, but seemed preoccupied until we were rolling again. I studied my map.
When we were out in the deserty countryside again, more rolling now, heading east, I said cheerily, “The Superstition Mountains and the Tonto National Forest should be coming up soon on my side. Then Globe and the Indian Reservation and Geronimo under your Gila Peak—all in an hour or so!”
“Yes,” she agreed, somewhat dubiously, “i
n an hour or so.”
I thought gaily, intoxicated by coffee, yes, she’s a somber Indian princess, all right, no pleasing her, and when she’s mummified, they’ll lay her pet Gila monster, reddish and black to match her little tunic, at her feet, mummified too.
But it was distinctly cooler now. She’d closed the window on her side, and I cranked mine halfway up. Dunkirk became sprightly and began to thumb her nose at Arizona’s sixty-mile speed limit. All night she’d been frightened and rather miserable, her tires tender and her heart careful for itself in the heat, a lonely Japanese in an arid, gritty land most unlike her moist and mountainous Honshu, ducking away from rocky phantoms, watching for poisonous snakes and dry furry big spiders (and gila monsters). But here with wooded hills to the north at least and now that it was cooler she could imagine she was home in Japan and foot it lightly.
I found myself feeling livelier too (although underneath there was a great weariness) and taking a livelier and more detailed interest in my companion. She had high cheekbones and, under her short straight nose, a rather wide, very mobile mouth. The upper lip was a bit fuller than the lower. I remembered the electricity of that single emphatic kiss. Her hands were narrow with long restless fingers and thumb that narrowed at their tips. She had a way of playing with her cigarette close by her face, as if it were a tiny baton orchestrating her thoughts, and sometimes she held it almost alarmingly close to her high-piled dark hair.
She was becoming livelier (or uneasier?) herself. She’d look ahead, then back, then off to the side, then light another cigarette (I had two packs on the dash), never at rest. But she didn’t seem to want to talk.
Dunkirk was climbing now. Globe was faintly astir as we ghosted through, although even astronomical twilight seemed hardly to have begun. And now the way was down and Dunkirk fairly leaped and then the way got straighter and more deserty again as we traversed the Indian Reservation.
I was running out of time with her, I knew, and now I felt impelled to make a move.
“Do you realize,” I said, really struck by it, “that we haven’t told each other our names?”
She’d been looking back. “I’m sorry,” she said, twisting around, her eyes wide with excitement or fear, or both, “but now I’m sure of it—it must be them. They’ve been behind us again ever since Globe and now they’re closing in.”
“Who are?” I asked. Then after a moment, “Those Sun men?”
In my more immediate interest in her I’d actually almost forgotten that game we’d played. I suddenly felt very furious with her and had a shockingly strong impulse to grab that flimsy dress at the neck and—
“Yes, the Solarians, who else?” she said sharply. “What’s more, I’m certain they’ve put a mental tail on us, so that we’ve got to blank our minds or think of something different to mislead them—anything except about them!”
“A mental tail?” I exploded. “Those dumb macho Sun men with asbestos brains? Besides, you told me none of the planet people are telepathic.”
“The Solarians are star folk, not planet people,” she countered angrily. “And all star folk are highly telepathic. Or didn’t they teach you in third grade the Sun’s a star? Now listen to me closely, dumbbell, I know this territory like I know my crotch, and we’ve got only one chance now to stay alive, or at most two. Behind each of the next two rises a side road goes off sharply to the left. You whip around the first one and douse your lights and stop, quick as you can start thinking for all you’re worth of something very different—I’ll tell you what.”
During the last part of that she had been lighting a cigarette with very nervous fingers. She took a deep, furious drag now and started to cough. Then I was yelling, “Like hell I will!” and we were going over the rise and she was yelling “Turn here!” between coughs and I wasn’t turning and then suddenly there was a bright white flash, a needle of very intense white light lancing through Dunkirk’s rear window and I smelled the stink of something burning and then I was steering with my left hand while I clamped the palm of my right to the side of her head to put out the fire in her hair there—a ghostly blue flame traveling swiftly upward.
Somehow that put a different complexion on the whole business and incidentally scared me half to death. I managed to get the fire out (my palm stung, but I hardly noticed) and keep the car on the road and even to speed up. And when we topped the next rise I braked sharply and followed her first orders exactly, and no mistakes. She needn’t have shouted, “Then turn here, dumbbell!” The side road was there, all right, just as she’d said, and I was down it and Dunkirk’s lights were out and she was stopped—and she was in my arms and pressed against me and her lips were giving those electric kisses (the shock is greater when there’s moisture, as you’d expect) and her fingers were busy with me and mine with her—one of my hands was near the neck of her dress, but it wasn’t tearing it—and I had realized what the “something different” thing was we were to think about exclusively.
There is really something very special about fingers, they’re so deft and clever, they know so much more than any other parts of the body, even the lips and tongue. And there is also something very special about skin felt through thin clothing, even two layers of it, say cotton and fine silk. The three textures move against each other most interestingly. Together they provide a very special sort of enjoyment that can go on and on. It is an argument for bundling, when you think about it.
After quite a long while (the sky was pale, the stars were gone except for Sirius) she murmured softly, “You know, my dear, we know we can’t have been thinking about anything else, either of us, or they’d have come back and got us.”
It occurred to me that I hadn’t once even seen the Solarian car. I started to tell her so, but she put her lips down on mine and turned on the electricity again, gently at first.
When I woke again, it was because a bright red ray of sun was poking me in the eye just as it had yesterday morning, and just like then, only worse. I felt I was being shot at. Were Sun men out by day, like their star was? I turned to ask her that, but she was gone.
Well, there’s not much to tell after that. I didn’t find her then and I haven’t found her since, my slim Mercurian. She’s gone completely back into Astrological Territory, I guess. Did the Solarians actually set her hair afire, or was it her cigarette? I really have no way of knowing. While cars burn up on our highways every day.
Anyhow, I was still about seventy-five miles from Lordsburg and very tired and all hot again and somehow very uneasy about that sun up there, getting higher and hotter every minute.
So after a bit I headed towards Lordsburg, fast as I dared. Dunkirk met a surprising number of light Datsun trucks used by the farmers thereabouts and wanted to linger and gossip with them about Japan, but I wouldn’t let her. That sun was really bothering me and making me nervous, I wanted to get entirely away from it and the heat, and sleep.
I stopped at the first refrigerated motel I spotted at Lordsburg—they call them that instead of air conditioned to distinguish them from the old breeze-and-hanging-wet-blanket type. The manager gave my pyjamas an odd look, but let me register, paying in advance—maybe he figured they proved I just wanted to sleep.
The shades were drawn in my cabin, the lights off, and the refrigeration on. I didn’t change any of those—it was so great to get out of the sun and heat. I made my way through the gloom to the bathroom and there I did need light—it was just too dark. So I flicked the switch.
No light came on, but heat struck the top of my head and the back of my neck. I got the damnedest, eeriest, most frightened feeling that the sun had come inside after me and I’d never be able to get away from him. She’d said the Sun men were very persistent. And now there began to come a dark, reddish glow.
I glanced from where I’d flinched down and saw three of those flat-faced infrared bulbs set in the ceiling, to warm a person while he washed or shaved on chilly mornings. I’d just flicked the wrong switch.
MOON DU
EL
First hint I had we’d been spotted by a crusoe was a little tick coming to my moonsuit from the miniradar Pete and I were gaily heaving into position near the east end of Gioja crater to scan for wrecks, trash, and nodules of raw metal.
Then came a whish which cut off the instant Pete’s hand lost contact with the squat instrument. His gauntlet, silvery in the raw low polar sunlight, drew away very slowly, as if he’d grown faintly disgusted with our activity. My gaze kept on turning to see the whole shimmering back of his helmet blown off in a gorgeous sickening brain-fog and blood-mist that was already falling in the vacuum as fine red snow.
A loud tock then and glove-sting as the crusoe’s second slug hit the miniradar, but my gaze had gone back to the direction Pete had been facing when he bought it—in time to see the green needle-flash of the crusoe’s gun in a notch in Gioja’s low wall, where the black of the shadowed rock met the gemlike starfields along a jagged border. I unslung my Swift (all-purpose vacuum rifle named for the .22 cartridge which as early as 1940 was being produced by Winchester, Remington, and Norma with factory loads giving it a muzzle velocity of 4,140 feet, almost a mile, a second) as I dodged a long step to the side and squeezed off three shots. The first two shells must have traveled a touch too high, but the third made a beautiful fleeting violet globe at the base of the notch. It didn’t show me a figure, whole or shattered, silvery or otherwise, on the wall or atop it, but then some crusoes are camouflaged like chameleons and most of them move very fast.
Pete’s suit was still falling slowly and stiffly forward. Three dozen yards beyond was a wide black fissure, though exactly how wide I couldn’t tell because much of the opposite lip merged into the shadow of the wall. I scooted toward it like a rat toward a hole. On my third step, I caught up Pete by his tool belt and oxy tube while his falling front was still inches away from the powdered pumice, and I heaved him along with me. Some slow or over-drilled part of my brain hadn’t yet accepted he was dead.
