The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “It had the flat, triangular head of an Old World viper,” Blakemore heard himself saying. “It’s crushed now, so you can’t see it.”

  “All right, don’t talk. Just get inside. The quicker we get the tourniquet on the better.”

  It was good advice, but Blakemore found himself under a compulsion to add: “My chances may not be too good. The venom could be cobra-deadly.”

  “An adder’s isn’t. Neither is a copperhead’s or a rattlesnake’s. Even a cobra— Listen, boy. You ought to know that. All the accounts are exaggerated—from the Black Widow spider on up. A centipede’s bite, for instance, is hardly worse than a bee sting, as a rule. Do you feel all right, so far?”

  Blakemore managed to nod.

  “Good. A cobra’s venom is a nerve poison, quick acting. Get rid of that fear right now and get inside.” Blakemore nodded and ascended the seven remaining rungs of the ladder, with Faran holding on to the arm over which the snake was draped to steady him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The worst thing of all was the crowding. Being human, there was nothing that Blakemore ordinarily appreciated more than sympathy. And the look in his wife’s eyes completely transcended the kind of very-real concern displayed by Gilda and Tyson. It was the kind of solicitude that could only mean that if he died she would die too, at least inwardly and would never be the same again this side of eternity. It was exactly the kind of solicitude that she resented when it was directed in the opposite direction. But now he could even forgive that strange quirk in her nature.

  If it hadn’t been for the crowding—

  They were all clustering so closely about him that Faran was having difficulty in making the incisions, for he had to keep stopping to gesture them back. And it gave him a smothering feeling even though neither Gilda nor his wife was standing that close to him, and Tyson was at least three feet away.

  He lay stretched out at full length on a metal cot and Faran was setting to work on his heel first, seeming to feel that the first order of business was to get the venom still lingering at the site of the wound out, as quickly as possible. He had made two crosswise cuts and was just bending to apply his lips to the wound when Helen brushed past him and knelt beside the cot.

  “Here, let me do that,” she said.

  Blakemore looked at Faran, raising himself a little, his hand going to his wife’s shoulder to push her gently back.

  “Is—is it dangerous?” he asked.

  Faran shook his head, smiling wryly. “If it was me—you’d have let me take the risk,” he said. “I’m surprised an ecologist wouldn’t know the risks are negligible. You must have seen it done before.”

  “Once or twice,” Blakemore said. “I knew, in a way, but—sometimes you don’t think.”

  “It’s all right,” Faran said. “Naturally you’re more concerned about Helen than anyone else. But if you’d thought it was dangerous I don’t think you’d have been too happy about letting me kill myself.”

  “Christ, no,” Blakemore said.

  “So—all’s forgiven.”

  He tapped Helen gently on the shoulder. “There may not be any venom,” he said. “But we don’t know, so we can’t take a chance. The greatest concentration is still at the site of the puncture. Only ten or twelve minutes have elapsed, so not much of the venom may have—well, we can only wait and see. Just keep drawing the blood into your mouth and spitting it out. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  When Helen had finished she stood up, pressed her husband’s arm and stood back, her shoulders shaking a little.

  The tourniquet was just a splinter of wood and a cloth bandage bound so tightly around Blakemore’s leg to stop the flow of arterial blood that he winced when Faran was applying it. Despite the way he felt it amused him a little to realize that the wooden splinter—it was peg-shaped, with a lizard-like head—came from the sea. It was one of the small, grotesquely shaped fragments of driftwood that Roger had picked up, along with the few rare and exquisitely beautiful shells that were sometimes cast up on non-tropical beaches, and which he had seemingly been unable to resist.

  “The earliest ones were made of rubber,” Faran said. “Esmarch’s is perhaps the best, in principle, but just a torn-up sheet has saved as many lives. More perhaps, because when people come staggering in after a snake bite, ripping a sheet off a bed is the first thing that comes to mind. Anything that puts a big dent in the circulation will do as well.”

  He paused an instant, then asked: “How do you feel now, boy? Be honest about it.”

  “I’m not sure,” Blakemore said. “All right, I guess. There’s a slight dizziness, but that could just come from the strain.”

  “And the excitement,” he added, with a thin smile.

  “We may well be getting excited about nothing,” Faran said. “That snake could be as harmless as—well, a garter snake or a black snake. Look—I read somewhere that there are two harmless snakes that look exactly like adders. Protective mimicry. ‘Don’t tread on me because you know what an adder can do to you. You’ve got to believe me. Look at my flat head.’”

  “I thought of that,” Blakemore said. “I guess there’s nothing I didn’t think of.”

  “That kind of protective mimicry could save the lives of a lot of people I’ve met too, Dad,” Gilda said.

  “I don’t think it’s too good an idea to flaunt the colors of malignancy,” Faran said. “In the end—you get your head flattened out even more.”

  “It’s damned unfortunate we haven’t some snakebite serum,” Tyson said. “But since you can’t positively identify the snake it might have been the wrong kind anyway.”

  “Quite possibly it would have been,” Faran agreed. “But since it would have done no harm, I would have injected it immediately. That’s like saying it would be nice if you could carry a collapsible medical clinic around with you which you could blow up like a toy balloon in the event of an emergency.

  As if feeling that what he had said was not as reassuring as it should have been he pressed Blakemore’s shoulder and went on thoughtfully: “I’m not at all seriously worried. Let’s put it this way. Unless the snake is a cobra, quickly applied emergency measures are extraordinarily effective. You may have a few bad moments—be as ill as you would be if you came down with a light to middling attack of influenza. It may last for a few days. I just don’t know. But the fact that you still don’t feel ill at all—you can write off the slight dizziness—is highly encouraging.”

  “If a coral snake had bitten me I’d be dead by now, is that what you mean?”

  Faran shook his head. “No, contrary to popular belief, there may have been many coral snake recoveries, despite the fact that it is almost as poisonous as a King Cobra. But a coral snake didn’t bite you—”

  He sighed. “I keep forgetting you know much more about snakes than I do. But that’s good, in a way—it means you know that everything I’ve told you is the truth. You either won’t become ill at all, because the snake was harmless or—”

  Helen Blakemore cut him short, her voice rising a little. “There’s something I’m waiting to hear both of you say. That there’s not the remotest chance that you’re both mistaken. That it’s not going to be very bad.”

  She covered her face with her hands, and Blakemore was sure that she had not wanted to come out with that, that she would rather have bitten her tongue off.

  “There’s always that possibility, darling,” Blakemore said. “Philip knows that—and so do you. But there’s something else you’re forgetting. The thread can be cut at any time, for anyone, young or old, and it happens so often that it’s just as well we can’t see how close to the precipice edge we’re standing every day of our lives. Let’s say I’ve just moved a few steps nearer, on this one particular day. But everyone does that constantly without even being aware of it.”

  Faran made no attempt to dispute what Blake
more had said. Instead he turned abruptly, and spoke directly to Gilda and Tyson. “Dan needs rest now—as much of it as he can get between now and tomorrow. So please vanish, both of you. Helen can stay with him as long as she wants to, but I’m hoping she won’t want to. There are times when it’s best for a man to be absolutely alone.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Helen Blakemore said. “But I think I know what you mean. I’ll go too. So will you, I suppose.”

  Faran nodded. “Of course.”

  He looked at Blakemore.

  “The communicator is right there—at your elbow. I’m suggesting this for your own good. You must avoid the slightest exertion or emotional strain for awhile. Lie back and close your eyes. Try to get some sleep. We want to keep your circulation as stabilized as possible.”

  “All right, I’ll try,” Blakemore said.

  It hit him an hour and a half later. Stomach cramps at first and then darting pains in his arms and legs. He reached for the communicator but almost immediately changed his mind, bringing his hand back to his side.

  Better to wait and find out how bad it was going to be. It was still not very bad and perhaps if he waited the pains would go away. He must not alarm Helen unless it became absolutely necessary.

  Besides, what could Faran possibly do? There was no remedy that could change the course of snakebite illness after emergency measures had been applied, except a serum that he was separated from by a wide waste of years.

  Whiskey? That wasn’t a remedy at all, but a lethal way of making sure that a bitten man’s chances of survival would be cut in half. It sent the poisoned blood coursing through every artery and vein and the harm it could do had been known for close to a century. It was as bad, if not worse, than the once widely practiced medical insanity of putting a man with cirrhosis of the liver on a starvation diet.

  He would simply have to endure it as long as he could, and after that, if the pains did not ease, accept the fact that a viper’s bite could kill, as it so often had.

  The bite of any poisonous snake could kill, and in the absence of emergency measures was more likely to do so than otherwise, despite what Faran had tried to make him believe. And even with emergency measures—the fatalities were legion.

  True, such bites could be almost as inconsequential as bee stings at times, but even bee stings could kill. It depended on the individual, his constitutional peculiarities, the freakishness with which any poisonous substance introduced into the body could bring about changes in the victim’s vital organs before making its exit.

  The pains in Blakemore’s limbs began to get worse, to march along in company with the dark turn his thoughts were taking.

  If nothing that Faran could do was going to help him, using the communicator would make very little sense. To have his wife at his side was the only good that could come of it. But it would be a wholly selfish kind of benefit and would bring her nothing but pain. To be forced to watch him suffer and be powerless to ease his torment— Had he any right to make her undergo such an ordeal?

  Was he going to die? If he was he would, of course, want her to be with him when the end came. But until that moment came, until his desire to spare her cracked under his terrible, human need—as of course it would—it was surely better to fight on alone.

  It wouldn’t be easy, but he felt that he could do it if he turned his face to the wall, drew up his knees and forced himself not to think of just how bad the pain had become, and how likely it was that a pain that started in a leg or an arm would not stay confined to a limb. It would almost certainly spread to his chest and interfere with his breathing and he would soon begin to feel a constriction about his heart.

  It didn’t seem to be happening, however. There were just the darting pains, and he could still draw a deep breath and hold it, and there was even a slight improvement in the way he felt, for the stomach cramps had gone away.

  He had not even considered the possibility that what he might have most to fear was the spread of the toxins in his bloodstream to the cells of his brain. He had no premonition concerning that at all, no forewarning, and when it happened he had no way of knowing that it had taken place, because he passed so swiftly from an awareness of his immediate surroundings into a gray world of vast, stationary shadows that it seemed perfectly natural to him to be standing in the midst of towering gray monoliths covered with indecipherable inscriptions carven into the stone.

  It was not strictly true, perhaps, to say that he had no awareness of the fact that everything about him had undergone a change. It was only that it all seemed so natural to him that it was hard for him to think of it as a change.

  There was a mountain too—a high, domed mountain with something shadowy and enormous bisecting it from its base to its summit, but he could not quite make out what the something was.

  A voice seemed to whisper to him that it might be just as well for him not to know, that it was a secret as old as Time itself.

  Long ages seemed to sweep by as he stood staring up at the towering monoliths and the mountain in the near distance. There was no sign of human life anywhere or any stir of movement that might have revealed the presence of some great beast lurking in shadows that could tear and rend.

  Yet—and this disturbed without frightening him as it should have done—he had the feeling that he was being watched by invisible eyes which might well have been the eyes of some great, hidden beast.

  Why was his fear not more acute? Was it because everything in proximity to him did not seem quite real enough to be firmly grasped, either by his hands if he should reach out and attempt to find out whether he was dreaming or awake, or by his mind if he brought his vision to a sharper focus and the shadows changed into something else?

  Somehow he was incapable of doing that, of testing the reality of everything he saw in that way.

  Then, quite suddenly, all of the shadows began to deepen and a curtain of blackness swept down over the monoliths. It was almost as if he were watching a play on a lighted stage, and the end of the final act had come. But that would not have been strictly true, because there had been no light behind the curtain bright enough to be cast by footlights even if the rest of the stage had been dark.

  It had never been more than a kind of half-light that had seemed on the verge of vanishing even when he had been able to make out by straining his eyes, the outlines of the domed mountain and the shadowy shape bisecting it from its base to its summit.

  And yet—it was a paradox that verged on the insane—he had actually been able to make out the inscriptions engraved on the monoliths, so distinctly that the configuration of every character had stood out with a startling clarity. He had been able to determine how impossible it would have been for him to decipher them, for although they bore a slight resemblance to Egyptian hieroglyphics the resemblance was tenuous at best and probably non-existent. Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics would have been beyond him anyway, except that he could have recognized the presence of animal-headed gods, and the stylized representations of human figures that were conspicuously absent in the monolith inscriptions.

  No, wait—there had been one recurring motif in most of the inscriptions. A little stick figure bearing what had looked like sheaves of wheat. That at least was Egyptian. But it was Assyrian, Babylonian, Trojan as well. In fact, there had been no ancient civilization in which that motif had not recurred on tomb-wall or temple engravings. But in going back over every visit he had ever made to a museum he was unable to recall having seen it so often repeated, amidst a small number of inscriptions that contained a great many other configurations that bore not the slightest resemblance to it.

  It was as if the little stick figure had become an obsession and been turned into the only pictorial symbol worth recording—as if the written glyptographs were merely embellishments designed to shower lavish praise on it, or perhaps just to indicate the great awe that it inspired and the
homage that should be rendered it.

  The monoliths and the domed mountain were being swallowed up now by the darkness, were growing dimmer and dimmer. And suddenly even the last glimmer of half-light was gone, and the darkness became ink-black and impenetrable.

  He could see nothing at all and he had the feeling that the ground on which he had been standing was dissolving beneath his feet and he was sinking down into an unfathomable gulf of emptiness. Sinking at first and then falling, his body becoming heavier, picking up speed as it plunged downward, moving with as great a velocity as a rock would have done if it had been hurled into the abyss from the top of the mountain. After that—there seemed to be nothing left to experience or remember.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Blakemore felt the tugging before he heard the far-off woman’s voice pleading with him. He could tell that it was a pleading voice just by the way it sounded. The words meant nothing to him until the voice came much nearer and the tugging stopped, as if whoever had taken hold of his arm had decided that the words alone, if she whispered them right into his ear, would awaken him just as quickly.

  “Dan, Dan—please. Open your eyes and look at me. You did a moment ago. Don’t you remember?”

  He couldn’t remember. But if Helen said so it was probably true, because, unlike most women, when something that she might have to struggle to make him accept happened she saw no reason to keep it to herself.

  The instant he opened his eyes and looked at her, precisely as she had urged him to do, everything came back—too fast for comfort. The snake bite, the cutting, her lips on his wounded heel, the stomach cramps and—the darting pains had been bad, bad. He had thought he was going to die. Why hadn’t he?

  She didn’t give him much time to remember. She just bent and kissed him until he had to plead with her to stop, because there were things he had to know immediately.