The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Frank Belknap Long

  The clearing was abruptly tumultuous with sound. The fury which had been unleashed against me turned upon the monster and became a closed circle of deadly, intent purpose hemming him in—and he was caught in a crossfire that hurled him backwards to the sand.

  He jumped up and lunged straight for the well. What happened then was like the awakening stages of some horrible dream. The madman shambled past the well, the air at his back a crackling sheet of flame. The barrage behind him was continuous and merciless. The men were organized now, standing together in a solid wall, firing with deadly accuracy and a grim purpose which transcended fear.

  The madman went clumping on past me and climbed a dune with his shoulders held straight. With a sunset glare deepening about him, he went striding over the dune and out of sight.

  * * * *

  I turned and stared back at the camp. The pursuit had passed the well and was headed for me. But no one paid the slightest attention to me. Twelve men passed me, walking three abreast. Bill came along in their wake, his eyes stony hard. He reached out as he passed me, gripping my shoulder, giving me a foot-of-the-gallows kind of smile.

  “We know now who killed Ned,” he whispered. “We know, fella. Take it easy, relax.”

  My head was throbbing, but I could see the big prints from where I stood—the prints of a murderer betrayed by his insatiable urge to slay.

  I saw Kenny pass, and he gave me a contemptuous grin. He had done his best to destroy me, but there was no longer any hate left in me.

  I took a slow step forward—and fell flat on my face.…

  I woke up with my head in Molly’s lap. She was looking down into my face, sobbing in a funny sort of way and running her fingers through my hair.

  She looked startled when she saw that I was wide awake. She blinked furiously and started fumbling at her waist for a handkerchief.

  “I must have passed out cold,” I said. “It’s quite a strain to be at the receiving end of a lynching bee. And what I saw afterwards wasn’t exactly pleasant.”

  “Darling,” she whispered, “don’t move, don’t say a word. You’re going to be all right.”

  “You bet I am!” I said. “Right now I feel great.”

  My arm went around her shoulder, and I drew her head down until her breath was warm on my face. I kissed her hair and lips and eyes for a full minute in utter recklessness.

  When I released her her eyes were shining, and she was laughing a little and crying too. “You’ve changed your mind,” she said. “You believe me now, don’t you?”

  “Don’t talk,” I said. “Don’t say another word. I just want to look at you.”

  “It was you right from the start,” she said. “Not Ned—or anyone else.”

  “I was a blind fool,” I said.

  “You never gave me a second glance.”

  “One glance was enough,” I whispered. “But when I saw how it seemed to be between you and Ned—”

  “I was never in love with him. It was just—”

  “Never mind, don’t say it,” I said. “It’s over and done with.”

  I stopped, remembering. Her eyes grew wide and startled, and I could see that she was remembering too.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did they catch that vicious rat?”

  She brushed back her hair, the sunlight suddenly harsh on her face. “He fell into the canal. The bullets brought him down, and he collapsed on the bank.”

  Her hand tightened on my wrist. “Bill told me. He tried to swim, but the current carried him under. He went down and never came up.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “Did anyone in the camp ever see him before?”

  Molly shook her head. “Bill said he was a drifter—a dangerous maniac who must have been crazed by the sun.”

  “I see,” I said.

  I reached out and drew her into my arms again, and we rested for a moment stretched out side by side on the sand.

  “It’s funny,” I said after a while.

  “What is?”

  “You know what they say about the whispering. Sometimes when you listen intently you seem to hear words deep in your mind. As if the Martians had telepathic powers.”

  “Perhaps they have,” she said.

  I glanced sideways at her. “Remember,” I said. “There were cities on Mars when our ancestors were hairy apes. The Martian civilization was flourishing and great fifty million years before the pyramids arose as a monument to human solidarity and worth. A bad monument, built by slave labor. But at least it was a start.”

  “Now you’re being poetic, Tom,” she said.

  “Perhaps I am. The Martians must have had their pyramids too. And at the pyramid stage they must have had their Larsens, to shoulder all the guilt. To them we may still be in the pyramid stage. Suppose—”

  “Suppose what?”

  “Suppose they wanted to warn us, to give us a lesson we couldn’t forget. How can we say with certainty that a dying race couldn’t still make use of certain techniques that are far beyond us.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said, puzzled.

  “Someday,” I said, “our own science will take a tiny fragment of human tissue from the body of a dead man, put it into an incubating machine, and a new man will arise again from that tiny shred of flesh. A man who can walk and live and breathe again, and love again, and die again after another full lifetime.

  “Perhaps the Martian science was once as great as that. And the Martians might still remember a few of the techniques. Perhaps from our human brains, from our buried memories and desires, they could filch the key and bring to horrible life a thing so monstrous and so terrible—”

  Her hand went suddenly cold in mine. “Tom, you can’t honestly think—”

  “No,” I said. “It’s nonsense, of course. Forget it.”

  I didn’t tell her what the whispering had seemed to say, deep in my mind.

  We’ve brought you Larsen! You wanted Larsen, and we’ve made him for you! His flesh and his mind—his cruel strength and his wicked heart! Here he comes, here he is! Larsen, Larsen, Larsen!

  THE SPIRAL INTELLIGENCE

  Originally published in Science-Fiction Plus, June 1953.

  Donald Brewster was alone. From the blazing wreckage of his spaceship to the canopy of foliage overhead the forest itself seemed to be conspiring against him, to be whispering and protesting as only a forest can when its age-old privacy has been invaded.

  An immense emerald prison was the forest, fragrant with growing things, strident with the cries of snowy-crested birds.

  It was a prison without bars, beautiful and strange and frightening. It was a naturalist’s paradise, and on Earth it would have challenged an explorer to take pride in loneliness and walk with squared shoulders. But what pain could be greater than the pain of loneliness light-years from Earth, what agony of frustration harder to endure than the crystallization of emotion which took place in a man when his heart whispered that he would never see Earth again.

  Never again the russet-and-gold splendor of an autumn landscape or the gleam of sunlight on familiar meadows. Never again a journey by sea and land—a journey made for delight alone with a woman tender and yielding at the end of it.

  Few would deny that the most desolate fate that can befall a man is the fate of the hermit. To be surrounded day and night by the unknown and the unknowable, to call out and hear no answering voice, to be cut off forever from all human sympathy—who can be blamed for preferring death to such a fate?

  No man perhaps. Yet Brewster did not want to die, and as the first shock of bitter realization wore off he found himself accepting with gratitude the fact that he was still alive and in full command of his faculties. Whatever befell, he would fight to stay alive until his strength gave out. He inspecte
d carefully the rations he had dragged from the burning ship, checking them item by item. Grim experience had taught him that strange fruits and berries were a major hazard, to be sternly shunned until hunger made a mockery of all caution.

  He’d have to risk poisoning himself if his skill in setting traps failed him. But he refused to believe it would fail, and meanwhile, if he husbanded every scrap, he could make his food last for at least a week. He pulled a flask from his pocket and took a long drink. Then he gave the bottle a pat, corked it firmly, and returned it to his hip.

  “First lesson in survival,” he muttered to the jungle shadows. “A man’s best friend is himself—first, last, and all the time.”

  Five minutes later he was threading his way through the forest in search of a place to camp. A sun much hotter than Sol burned down like an angrily pursuing eye, mocking his confidence and making him feel suddenly fearful, and less sure of himself.

  It irked him to realize that the planet was down on the charts as an uninhabited world. There was an abundance of animal life, but no chance at all that he might be given food and shelter by friendly natives. He comforted himself with the thought that humanoid creatures were as often as not unfriendly. To see a creature intelligent enough to have mastered the use of fire come loping out of the jungle on eight stalk-like legs would not be a pleasant experience, and if a man were himself unarmed—

  * * * *

  Brewster’s thoughts congealed. He stood utterly motionless, refusing to believe in the reality of what he saw, telling himself with a sudden, tremendous tensing of his muscles and nerves that he had escaped death too recently to have it confront him again in so horrible a form. It was against all reason, a twist of fate too cruel to accept at face value.

  The lizard towered directly in his path. It had emerged from a tunnel of dark vegetation less than seventy feet ahead and it was staring straight at him—a scaly and vermilion-crested monster with a row of armored spikes running the length of its spine.

  There were shadows where it stood, a mingling of sunlight and darkness which in some queer way made its swaying bulk seem even greater than it was.

  A flicker of light gleamed on its bared teeth, and it was staring with the malign ferocity of a carnivorous beast aware of its own strength and agility, a beast that had come suddenly upon a prey that could not possibly escape.

  Brewster was still frantically telling himself that it was an illusion—when a gun roared nearby. The roar was deafening, but its reverberation was almost instantly drowned out by the lizard’s piercing scream as the monster went hurtling back into the underbrush, its body cut in two. There was an instant of silence, complete, mind-numbing. Then from the underbrush stepped a tall man with a smoking gun, his face peering mournfully into the shadows as if he felt pity for the beast he had been forced to slay.

  Amazingly he wore a uniform which Brewster recognized, but had never expected to see again. His eyes were steel-gray and piercing, his cheekbones prominent, and his nose a sharp, bony ridge slightly flattened at the tip.

  White-lipped, shaken, Brewster shifted his weight from one trembling leg to the other. He waited for the stranger to speak, but the tall man seemed in no hurry. He stood for a moment nodding at Brewster, as if to give the man whose life he had saved full opportunity to regain his composure. Then, suddenly, his ruggedly handsome features widened in a grin. “Ugly brutes, those lizards. For all I know they may be harmless. But the odds seem definitely against it.”

  “Harmless—”

  The tall man chuckled. “Well, I’ve never been attacked by one. I’ve been careful to keep out of their way. At fifty feet or so a wrong guess might kill you. That’s why I blasted when I saw how close you were.” Brewster shivered. “I’m glad you didn’t waste any time thinking it over!”

  “So am I!” The stranger’s grin was enlivened by a merry twinkle of voice and eye. “Guess I should introduce myself. I’m Captain James Emery, United States Interstellar Survey. We had a crackup some two months ago, and we’ve been living off the land ever since.”

  “You’re not alone then?”

  Brewster was still so shaken he was afraid the other might think him lacking in courage. But Emery answered his question in a tone which had nothing of contempt in it, only a warm friendliness.

  “No, my wife came along to look after me. She’s a Survey officer in her own right, but this is the first time we’ve explored a new planet together. The trip was to be a kind of second honeymoon for both of us.” He nodded. “It’s funny, you, know. When you emerge from overdrive tens of thousands of light-years from Earth you get a feeling of renewal, of rebirth. There’s a brightness and newness about everything, and you’re not weighed down with memories.”

  His eyes grew speculative. “The psychos could probably explain it. There was a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays who lightly dismissed a crime he’d committed by claiming it happened long ago and in another country. It’s easy to find that amusing—or viciously cynical. But I’ve always felt Shakespeare’s scoundrel displayed profound insight. Time and distance does make a difference, even when you’re not a scoundrel.”

  “That’s an angle I didn’t have time to think about,” Brewster said. “My ship cracked up and caught fire. I was looking for a drier place to camp when that lizard appeared I thought I was having a nightmare.”

  “They’re agile,” Emery conceded. “First you see them, then you don’t.” Brewster did not smile. He was staring at the Survey officer as if amazed by the tricks of fate.

  “Do you know—I wouldn’t be here at all if my sensitive instruments hadn’t analyzed every ounce of metal in your ship far out in space,” he said. “I had no way of discovering that the metal was in a wrecked spaceship. I thought that there was a rich lode of Ullurian ore here in a natural state. That’s why I headed straight for this vicinity and was probably wrecked by a repetition of the same ugly weather conditions that you ran into.”

  Emery nodded and gestured toward the forest gloom, his rugged features sympathetic.

  “That’s quite possible,” he agreed. “Even those trees are no protection when the elements really cut loose here. But at least we’ve found a place to camp. You’re welcome to share it with us if you don’t mind taking pot luck with a man whose only specialty is hunting food animals. Without my instruments I’m just the bright lad who got himself shipwrecked without a compass or a guiding star.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” Brewster said.

  “Fine! I forgot to ask your name—”

  “Donald Brewster, I’m a rare-metal prospector, as I guess you’ve surmised!”

  “Welcome to the third planet of the bright star Rugulius, sir. Welcome to a camping site that’s distinctly on the unbelievable side.”

  He seemed amused by Brewster’s puzzlement. “Believe it or not, we’re camping in a circular limestone tower eighty feet high. It’s not a ruin, exactly. It’s more like a big sea-shell rising from the forest floor, scoured and glistening inside and out.”

  “You mean it really is a shell?”

  Emery shook his head. “I wouldn’t call it that. Only a highly intelligent creature could have built it. The individual limestone blocks are perfectly aligned, and the design as a whole is far too imaginative to be accidental. It could have been constructed only by some creature with an eye for beauty of design.” He laid a friendly hand on Brewster’s shoulder. “Come see for yourself,” he said. “It’s less than ten minutes walk, if we keep to this path.”

  It was an incredible walk. Butterflies as huge as dinner plates, vivid scarlet and aquamarine, rose in swirling clouds before them, and half-blinded them with their fluttering. Little fuzzy creatures with enormous ears peered from rifts in the foliage, and then shrieked and vanished like startled elves, leaving behind them a faint odor of musk.

  Once the survey office
r seized Brewster’s arm and pulled him abruptly to one side. In the path a ten-foot snake reared, its viper-like head repulsive with jungle phosphorescence. They found their way blocked in another place by a hideous swarm of blood-red worms, and in still another by a brooding bird with iridescent plumes and a huge gular pouch.

  The bird refused to budge until Emery bent and gave her a gentle prod. Then she arose and went screaming away through the forest, leaving behind two pale-blue eggs which Emery gratefully pocketed. The path changed direction, and the great trees thinned a little.

  The clearing was visible for a full minute before they reached it, a glimmering oval in the foliage-choked jungle wall directly ahead, growing continuously brighter.

  * * * *

  Emery was the first to emerge. He swung about and watched his companion claw his way into the open. He was eager to observe Brewster’s expression when he first set eyes on the tower. The Survey officer’s curiosity was satisfied almost instantly, and in a wholly satisfying manner. Brewster had been told what to expect, but there was a look in his eyes as he stared which left no doubt that his imagination had left enormous gaps. The beauty and vitality of the tower had to be seen to be appreciated.

  It did resemble a gigantic sea-shell, but its smoothly flowing whorls and convolutions bore the unmistakable stamp of intelligent artistry.

  There was a circular opening at its base, visible clear across the clearing, and in the opening stood a woman whose face and figure, once seen, could not be readily forgotten. Helen Emery must have heard her husband coming and had gone to the door to meet him. Brewster could see her smile clearly, the flash of ivory-white teeth. The sun touched warm glints in her hair, and her dark eyes were bright with an eager questioning.

  In a moment the two men were at the door, and Helen Emery was greeting her husband. Brewster could see that her love for him was both strong and elemental. It was in the caress of her fingers on his face, in the tenderness of her expression, in the very way she held herself when she kissed him. An instant of fulfillment it seemed, complete in itself, as if he had been gone from her for a whole lifetime. Then she turned quickly to Brewster, her eyes wide again with unspoken questions. Emery talked with her for a moment, raising his voice a little so that Brewster could hear everything that was said. When he had finished Helen Emery came forward and took Brewster’s hand in hers.