The embodied apparition again leaped to his feet, glaring at Mark, who unconcernedly resumed his wax-chipping. Ignored, Mark II began pacing in circles around the coffin and muttering to himself.
“What a vanity,” he fumed. “Me, a figment of his imagination. It’s more likely he’s a figment of my imagination. I’m crazier than he is. Always have been.” He stopped to address Mark the first in a patiently instructive tone. “You’re digging at the wrong door if you want water. That one is full of preserved fruit. The next cabinet has corn and beans. The one on the far right contains water. So if you think I’m an hallucination, see if I’m not right.”
Mark looked at his replica in astonishment. “You mean you want me to prove that you’re not a mere fragment of a temporarily disordered imagination? But if I do, that means you must be a specter or a ghost, and I won’t believe that either.”
“I don’t care what you believe,” Mark said sulkily.
The last of the wax was loosened and he opened the door. Shelf upon shelf covered with jars of preserved fruit met his gaze. Mark was astonished, to say the least, but he contrived to hide it from his visitor by quietly closing the door and starting to work on the door at the extreme right.
“For a mere hallucination,” he remarked, chipping away with a great show of nonchalance, “you do seem remarkably accurate in your predictions.”
“I notice you’re working on the one with the water,” Mark said, sarcastically.
AND water it was. Mark was not really surprised this time. After finding the fruit he had realized that this nightmarish creature knew what he was talking about. There were too many other things that might have been in that cabinet to attribute the phantom’s wisdom to guesswork. The phantom knew; but just how he knew was a mystery yet to be solved.
Mark dug the wax stopper out of a three-gallon bottle and let a quantity of refreshing, but flat-tasting water trickle down his throat. Then with the remainder he washed the clinging dust from his body, while the facsimile looked on with an expression of amusement on his — or rather Mark’s — face.
“What are you going to dry yourself with?” he inquired loftily.
Mark looked about him helplessly, then brightened up. “If you will stop showing off and tell me which locker my clothes are in, I’ll find something.”
“Not necessary,” Mark said, reaching out his hand. In it appeared a long, fuzzy, bath towel. Mark controlled an urge to gape, and took the towel.
“Thanks,” he said, applying the creation, which seemed to absorb water quite as well as one manufactured in the usual way. “You’ll have to teach me that trick sometime. But right now I wish you’d tell me just what you are, and why you insist on haunting me.”
The phantom hopped up and down in fury. Most of the time his feet didn’t touch the ground, but that didn’t seem to bother him, not in the least.
“Insults!” he howled. “Nothing but insults! I’m not a ghost. I refuse to be considered a ghost!”
Then, as if he took perverse pleasure in self-contradiction, his flesh slowly became transparent and finally melted away, leaving nothing but the bony framework, which proceeded to drape itself in the familiar attitude, atop the coffin lid.
“Don’t do that,” Mark begged. “It’s — it’s disgusting.”
“I shall do it if I like,” the skeleton answered, snappishly cracking a fleshless knuckle. “It’s cooler.”
Mark sighed resignedly and sat down on the far end of the coffin, determined not to be surprised at anything that might happen from now on. He noted with interest that the skeleton had a neatly-healed break in a collar bone. The visitor surely was carrying out the duplication to ghoulish perfection. Mark remembered receiving that break in the last quarter of a college football game during his senior year, and was pleased to see that it had knit so well.
“It’s a long, sad story,” began the skeleton, in a hollow voice. “My race was born, and lived out its life on the Earth’s satellite. It is remarkable, when you think of it, that a race could evolve far enough to reach a high state of development on that little planet. Gravitation being slight, the Moon lost its atmosphere at a fast rate. The entire habitable life of the planet lasted hardly longer than one geological age of the Earth.
“My people advanced rapidly, I suppose, because we worked as a unit. No dissension; no individual ambitions. Every one of us strived for the advancement of the race, not for his own betterment.
“But things happened rapidly on my world. Eventually we had to burrow underground and establish great sealed caverns in which life could continue independently of the fast failing air supply on the surface.
“BUT just as my race had evolved rapidly, it declined also at a fast pace. The time came when, out of the vast millions which once roamed the planet, there were only a few dozens of us left; and these few had almost completely lost the power to reproduce.
“I was one of these, in fact one of the last to be born. At an early age I showed signs of being a little — well —” the skeleton smirked modestly — “unique. I saw no sense in co-operating with the others in finding a way to increase our reproductive capacity. It was my contention that a million ordinary people were of no more use than a few high-grade specimens. Quantity was not to be more desired than quality. My aim was to find a way to preserve the lines of the few who remained.
“Nobody agreed with me, of course, so I had to work alone, solving the problem without aid.” His tone now became happily martyrish. “I devised a radioactive fluid in which a brain could live, immersed, forever. For several million years, anyway. The body would have to be abandoned, of course. The others finally accepted my idea, inasmuch as they had failed to reach their own goal.
“Unfortunately it didn’t work out so well in their cases. They had absolutely no sense of humor. Their lives had always been so serious that when they were freed from the eternal struggle for existence, they were unable to satisfy themselves with abstract thought. The sustaining necessity to solve vital problems had been removed.
“For a time they occupied themselves by inventing imaginary problems, and then joining in finding the solutions. But this was just silly and eventually they began to fall into periodic stupors, each of longer duration, until finally their brains ceased to function altogether. At least there has been no thought radiation from any of them for over fifty thousand years.”
“They still exist then?” queried Mark.
“Oh yes. They can’t die, in a physical sense, as long as they remain immersed in the fluid. They still lie in their containers in the interior of the Moon, protected from any possible harm by a spherical wall of force which we created as a stasis in the fabric of space shortly after we abandoned our bodies.
“That was the only project that I ever joined the others in accomplishing. It was a great idea. The whole planet could disintegrate without harming the brain containers. The stasis can only be dissolved by the agency which created it — the combined thought force of many powerful brains!
“I suppose I may as well believe you,” Mark sighed. “Here you are, sitting on my coffin, looking like the breakup of a hard winter, and your brain really resides on the Moon. But I must say I wish you’d just quietly passed out the way your pals did, instead of going about shedding sweetness and light in people’s tombs — particularly mine. I don’t suppose I could persuade you to go away.”
THE skeleton ignored him. “The main point in which I differed from my contemporaries lay in the fact that I had a sense of humor,” the skeleton went on. “Maybe you’ve noticed. I’m a psychological mutant. My mind was never geared to the eternal struggle for existence, as theirs were. I could never believe that just living on was of much importance. A race of beings content to inhabit a small satellite of a minor planet of a fourth-rate sun, struck me as being pretty small potatoes. To coin a phrase.” The skeleton giggled.
“After we had forsaken our bodies,” he went on, “and our brains had taken up residence inside our wall o
f force, I couldn’t join the others in their pointless games. I had to have something to amuse me. So naturally I went exploring. Not physically, of course. My race had mastered thought long before I was born. By projecting my ego where I wished, I was able to observe life on the other worlds, some of them far outside the solar system.”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Mark. “Am I to understand you are really doing your thinking from the brain on the Moon, and these creations of yours — the body you just had, the awful thing you’re wearing now, and the towel — are mere hypnotic suggestions which you have impressed upon my brain by means of projected thought waves?”
“Nothing of the sort,” the skeleton snapped, “You couldn’t dry yourself with a hypnotic suggestion.”
Mark pondered this for a moment. “No,” he admitted, “but I could imagine I had, if you hypnotized me into thinking so.”
“And catch an imaginary cold, I suppose,” remarked the skeleton sarcastically. “You have the wrong idea. I wouldn’t hoax anybody into seeing things that don’t exist. It’s hard enough to believe the things that do exist. That towel is just as real as any matter is. So was the copy of your body, and so is this skeleton.
“Of course matter isn’t so very real, at that. Matter is only a function of space. So is energy. Space is the only real thing. Energy — regardless of its form — is merely a wave in space caused by some action of matter. And matter is merely a concentration of space-in-motion, the motion being caused by energy. It’s all very simple.”
“Yes, of course,” agreed Mark. “Only I don’t understand it.”
“You will when you’ve lived a few more thousands of years. As for doing my thinking from the Moon, I don’t. When I choose to go exploring, my intelligence leaves the brain and travels instantaneously to the place I wish to go. Then, if I want a body, I merely create one from the energy waves which abound in space. But no matter what form of body I may acquire, I always retain the senses and powers with which a free intelligence is endowed.”
“How convenient,” Mark commented. “But if you can do all this independent of your brain, it wouldn’t matter much if your brain were destroyed, would it?”
Rattling nimbly, the skeleton jumped to its feet. Mark winced.
“Gracious me!” the skeleton exclaimed. “I never thought of that. Here I’ve been jumping in and out of that brain for thousands of years — and never considered that I might not need the pesky thing at all. I’ll have to think this over. Goodbye for now!”
Chapter 3: Welcome Stranger
ABRUPTLY the voice ceased and as it did the skeleton collapsed in an untidy heap on the floor. Mark sensed immediately, with a certain feeling of loneliness, that the intelligence had left for parts unknown. The pile of bones proved that the brain’s creations were of real matter and only disappeared when he purposely destroyed them.
“Well,” Mark thought, “he left me with a set of spare bones, at any rate.”
A rush of memories — of people he had known, places that were familiar to him, and things he had held dear — came to trouble him as he found himself alone once more with his thoughts. He was glad now that he had been pretty much alone during that earlier, far-off part of lifetime. There was no wife to mourn, no sweetheart. That would have made it harder. It wouldn’t be an easy thing to suddenly realize that a girl — the girl whom you had last seen alive and lovely and young was now nothing but a crumble of dust, dead for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
Gloomily Mark attacked the wax on another of the cabinet doors. Finishing this one, he went on to the next and the next, trying by means of sheer activity to close his mind to thoughts of a world long dead.
Before he had removed the wax from the last of the doors, he was wondering in what part of the world his tomb was, and how many centuries had passed since the operation... “Did I ever tell you about my operation?” he could ask. “Well, it was about four thousand years ago...” A fine thing.
His visitor had hinted that he was still in North America. That was indefinite but he supposed it didn’t matter. Everything would be different anyway. The phantom had claimed that Mark would understand the complex nature of space, matter, and energy when he had “lived a few more thousands of years.” That might imply that he had already lived a few thousands of years. On the other hand if he were to assume that it did, he must also assume that the specter was speaking seriously and really meant that he had thousands more years to live. Which, of course, was pure rot.
It obviously wouldn’t do to put too much faith in anything the creature had said, he decided, inasmuch as it had freely admitted being more or less crazy. “Just a goofy ghost,” he tried to tell himself, firmly averting his eyes from that messy pile of ribs, tibia, clavicles, vertebrae and bony etcetera on the floor.
A GLANCE through one of the small windows revealed that the nearby country was heavily wooded and the ground covered with dense underbrush. This decided him on what to wear, and he set about to select it. The first three cabinets he examined contained ordinary street apparel. The old doctor had evidently held out some hope that the old civilization might continue after the wars were over.
But the next five lockers indicated that this hope had been none too strong, for they were stuffed with clothing designed for outdoor life. Two more of the cabinets were filled with underwear and another contained shoes and boots. In a short time Mark was dressed to cope with the surrounding forest, and equipped with weapons to take care of any wild life he might encounter.
In addition to the highly efficient automatic pistol, he carried a stainless-steel hand-axe fastened to his belt. The underbrush would make this a valuable tool. A small pocket compass should prevent getting lost, and the tiny, needle-throwing machine-gun nestling beside it in a jacket pocket might come in handy in dealing with any hostile humans he might meet in his travels.
Mark really didn’t expect to find the world greatly changed, but he certainly wasn’t taking any chances. For all he knew his period of suspended animation might have lasted only a hundred years or so. It was hard to say just how long it might have taken for his grave-clothes to disintegrate. The clothing he was now wearing showed no signs of age, but then of course he had the doctor’s story that they were made of some new fabric of glass, although they certainly didn’t look it. As far as the incident of the spook was concerned, he wasn’t at all sure now that he hadn’t dreamed up the whole upsetting incident. He fervently prayed that it was so.
Considering everything he decided it wouldn’t be at all unlikely that he would find a civilized community a few hours’ walk from the vault.
The doctor’s fear that the wars going on at the time of his record, would leave the world devastated and civilization wrecked, were very likely exaggerated. He had heard the same fears expressed many times before, and nothing of the kind had happened.
As a last preparation before venturing forth he took a long swig from the bottle of insipid water. He had no intention of returning to the tomb until he had done some extensive exploring in the neighborhood, and there might not be any streams handy. As he returned the bottle to the cabinet his eyes passed fleetingly over the compartments containing the food supplies. He wondered if he shouldn’t eat something before he left, but decided he wasn’t particularly hungry.
The forest was an impenetrable tangle of trees in all stages of growth. Mark noticed that the underbrush wasn’t nearly as thick as he had supposed. The window, he remembered, had shown him only a small view and in that direction there were several dense clumps of foliage.
He was about to replace the hand-axe when he changed his mind and tucked it back in its belt-strap. It would be worth carrying for use as a trail marker.
The sun, although he couldn’t see it through the tall trees, seemed to be southeasterly, which indicated that it was before noon. This left him plenty of time to explore before dark drove him to shelter. Without any particular reason, for one direction is as good as another when you have no idea wh
ere you are, he decided to follow Mr. Greeley’s advice.
A FEW hundred years ago — or was it a few thousand — Mark had possessed a unique propensity for getting into trouble. His small inheritance had made it possible for him to get along comfortably without any sort of salary. And he had found it impossible to live a routine existence. Athletics had provided a suitable outlet for the surplus energy; but he has also been cursed with an overwhelming curiosity concerning almost everything on earth. As a consequence he had often poked his handsome nose into places where people displayed alarming readiness to bash it flat. This instinct had apparently survived the years of suspended animation, for westward was the one way he could have chosen that would lead him into trouble in practically unlimited amounts.
This fact was not to come to light until Mark had covered quite a few miles. Indeed it seemed as he trudged along in the forest that never in his conscious lifetime had he encountered a more peaceful portion of the earth.
Sunlight filtered, here and there, through the dense, leafy canopy overhead and made bright patches on the ground, lending cheer to the grayish twilight which pervaded the lower reaches of this vast woodland. The songs of unseen birds among the branches, and the occasional squirrel who sat back on its haunches to gaze in frank curiosity, only to dart suddenly up the bole of a tree at his approach, combined to lull Mark into a dreamy — and utterly misguided — sense of security.
So rapt was he in his lyrical contemplation of nature’s beauty that he went on blissfully for quite a distance before he remembered that he had completely neglected to mark the trees to indicate his trail.
He stopped, half minded to retrace his steps, when it occurred to him that he had been walking in a straight line since the last mark, and it should be easy to bridge the gap on his return. To make sure, he marked several trees close together in a line in the same direction, then continued on, satisfied. The precaution was entirely useless. But he didn’t find that out for quite a while. In fact if he could have foreseen what lay ahead, it is likely that even Mark would have locked himself in the tomb and refused to budge a step.
The Best of Argosy #2 - Minions on the Moon Page 2
