“That’s not it,” I said doubtfully. “I think you gave me the wrong orders.”
“Wrong?” he bellowed. “Wrong? I am never wrong!” He got up, and before I knew what was coming, he hauled off and cracked three knuckles with my jawbone. I hit the deck with a crash and slid up against Jo Hartley. Jo didn’t move. He was alive, but he just didn’t seem to give a damn. I lay there for a long time before I could get up again. I wanted to kill Bort Brecht, but there was something I had to do first.
I went back to the captain and butted him out of the chair. He snarled at me and went and crouched by the bulkhead, tears still streaming down his cheeks. I slumped into the seat, my fingers wandering idly about the controls without touching them, my eyes desperately trying to avoid the glory of Xantippe.
It seemed to me that I was very near to the thing I was to do. My right hand touched the infragun activator switch, came away, went back to it, came away. I boldly threw another switch; a network of crosshairs and a bright central circle appeared on the screen. This was it, I thought. Bort Brecht yelped like a kicked dog when the crosshairs appeared, but did not move. I activated the gun, and grasped the range lever in one hand and the elevation control in the other. A black-centered ball of flame hovered near the surface of the planet.
This was it! I laughed exultantly and pushed the range lever forward. The ball plunged into the dull-silver mystery, leaving a great blank crater. I pulled and pushed at the elevation control, knowing that my lovely little ball was burning and tearing its inexorable way about in the planet’s vitals. I drew it out to the surface, lashed it up and down and right and left, cut and slashed and tore.
Bort Brecht was crouched like an anthropoid, knees bent, knuckles on the deck, fury knotting his features, eyes fixed on the scene of destruction. Behind me Phil Hartley was teetering on tiptoe, little cries of pain struggling out of his lips every time the fireball appeared. Bort spun and was beside me in one great leap. “What’s happening? Who’s doing that?”
“He is,” I said immediately, pointing at Jo Hartley. I knew that this was going to be tough on Jo, but I was doing the thing I had to do, and I knew Bort would try to stop me. Bort leaped on the prone figure, using teeth and nails and fists and feet; and Phil Hartley hesitated only a minute, torn between the vision of Xantippe and something that called to him from what seemed a long, long while ago. Then Jo cried out in agony, and Phil, a human prototype of my fireball, struck Bort amidships. Back and forth, fore and aft, the bloody battle raged, while Seabiscuit whimpered and the skipper, still sunk in his introspective trance, wept silently. And I cut and stabbed and ripped at Xantippe.
I took care now, and cut a long slash almost from pole to pole; and the edges opened away from the wound as if the planet had been wrapped in a paper sheath. Underneath it was an olive-drab color, shot with scarlet. I cut at this incision again and again, sinking my fireball in deeper at each slash. The weakened ovoid tended to press the edges together, but the irresistible ball sheared them away as it passed; and when it had cut nearly all the way through, the whole structure fell in on itself horribly. I had a sudden feeling of lightness, and then unbearable agony. I remember stretching back and back over the chair in the throes of some tremendous attack from inside my body, and then I struck the deck with my head and shoulders, and I was all by myself again in the beautiful black.
There was a succession of lights that hurt, and soothing smells, and the sound of arcs and the sound of falling water. Some of them were weeks apart, some seconds. Sometimes I was conscious and could see people tiptoeing about. Once I thought I heard music.
But at last I awoke quietly, very weak, to a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. It was Dr. Renn. He looked older.
“How do you feel, Rip?”
“Hungry.”
He laughed. “That’s splendid. Know where you are?”
I shook my head, marveling that it didn’t hurt me.
“Earth,” he said. “Psy hospital. You’ve been through the mill, son.”
“What happened?”
“Plenty. We got the whole story from the picrecording tapes inside and outside of your ship. You cut Xantippe all to pieces. You incidentally got Bort Brecht started on the Hartley family, which later literally cut him to pieces. It cost three lives, but Xantippe is through.”
“Then—I destroyed the projector, or whatever it was—”
“You destroyed Xantippe. You—killed Xantippe. The planet was a … a thing that I hardly dare think about. You ever see a hydro-medusa here on Earth?”
“You mean one of those jellyfish that floats on the surface of the sea and dangles paralyzing tentacles down to catch fish?”
“That’s it. Like a Portuguese man-of-war. Well, that was Xantippe, with that strange mind field about her for her tentacles. A space dweller; she swept up anything that came her way, killed what was killable, digested what was digestible to her. Examination of the pictures, incidentally, shows that she was all set to hurl out a great cloud of spores. One more revolution about Betelgeuse and she’d have done it.”
“How come I went under like that?” I was beginning to remember.
“You weren’t as well protected as the others. You see, when we trained that crew we carefully split the personalities; paranoiac hatred enough to carry them through the field and an instant reversion to manic depressive under the influence of the field. So you were the leader—you were delegated to do the job. All we could do to you was implant a desire to destroy Xantippe. You did the rest. But when the psychic weight of the field was lifted from you, your mind collapsed. We had a sweet job rebuilding it, too, let me tell you!”
“Why all that business about ‘one sane man’?”
Renn grinned. “That was to keep the rest of the crew fairly sure of themselves, and to keep you from the temptation of taking over before you reached the field, knowing that the rest, including the captain, were not responsible for their actions.”
“What about the others, after the field disappeared?”
“They reverted to something like normal. Not quite, though. The quartermaster tied up the rest of the crew just before they reached Earth and handed them over to us as Insurrectionist spies!
“But as for you, there’s a command waiting for you if you want it.”
“I want it,” I said. He clapped me on the shoulder and left. Then they brought me a man-sized dinner.
Ghost of a Chance
SHE SAID, “There’s something following me!” in a throttled voice, and started to run.
It sort of got me. Maybe because she was so tiny and her hair was so white. Maybe because, white hair and all, she looked so young and helpless. But mostly, I think, because of what she said. “There’s something following me.” Not “someone.” “Something.” So I just naturally hauled out after her.
I caught her at the corner, put my hand on her shoulder. She gasped, and shot away from me. “Take it easy, lady,” I panted. “I won’t let it get you.”
She stopped so suddenly that I almost ran her down. We stood looking at each other. She had great big dark eyes that didn’t go with her hair at all. I said, “What makes you go dashing around at three o’clock in the morning?”
“What makes you ask?” Her voice was smooth, musical.
“Now, look—you started this conversation.”
She started to speak, and then something over my shoulder caught her eye. She froze for a second; and I was so fascinated by the play of expression on her face that I didn’t follow her gaze. Abruptly she brought her eyes back to my face and then slapped it. It was a stinger. I stepped back and swore, and by the time I was finished she was halfway up the block. I stood there rubbing my cheek and let her go.
I met Henry Gade a couple of days later and told him about it. Henry is a practical psychologist. Perhaps I should say his field is practical psychology, because Henry ain’t practical. He has theories. He has more damn theories than any man alive. He is thirty and bald and he makes lots of mo
ney without doing any work.
“I think she was crazy,” I said.
“Ah,” said Henry, and laid a finger beside his nose. I think the nose was longer. “But did you ask her what she thought?”
“No. I only asked her what she was doing running around that time of night.”
“The trouble with you, Gus, is that you have no romance in you. What you should have done was to catch her up in your arms and smothered her with kisses.”
“She’d have sla—”
“She did, anyway, didn’t she?” said Henry, and walked off.
Henry kids a lot. But he sometimes says crazy things like that when he isn’t kidding a bit.
I met the girl again three months later. I was in the Duke’s beer garden looking at his famous sunflower. The sunflower was twelve feet tall and had crutches to keep it standing up. It grew beside the dirt alley that was the main road of the beer garden. There were ratty-looking flowerbeds all over the place and tables set among them. And Japanese lanterns that had been out in the rain, and a laryngitic colored band. The place was crowded, and I was standing there letting all that noise beat me back and forth, looking at the sunflower. The Duke swore he could fill a No. 6 paper bag with the seeds from that one flower.
And then she said, “Hello. I’m sorry I had to slap your face.” She was squinched up against the stem of the sunflower, in amongst all those shadows and leaves.
I said, “Well, if it isn’t my pretty little pug. What do you mean, you’re sorry you had to? You should be just sorry you did.”
“Oh, I had to. I wouldn’t slap you just for nothing.”
“Oh—I did something? I shoulda got slapped?”
“Please,” she said. “I am sorry.”
I looked at her. She was. “What are you doing in there—hiding?”
She nodded.
“Who are you hiding from?”
She wouldn’t say. She just shrugged and said she was just—you know—hiding.
“Is it the same thing you were running away from that night?”
“Yes.”
I told her she was being silly. “I looked all around after you left and there wasn’t a thing on the street.”
“Oh, yes there was!”
“Not that I could see.”
“I know that.”
I suddenly got the idea that this was a very foolish conversation. “Come out of there and have a beer with me. We’ll talk this thing over.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that!”
“Sure you could. Easy. Look.” I reached in and grabbed her.
“You should know better than that,” she said, and then something happened to break the stem of the big sunflower. It tottered and came crashing down like a redwood. The huge flower landed on the tray that Giuseppe, the waiter, was carrying. It held eight long beers, two pitchers and a martini. The beers and a lot of broken glass flew in every direction but up. The martini went back over his head and crashed on the bars of the cage where the Duke kept his trained squirrel. There was some confusion. The girl with the white hair was gone. All the time that the Duke was telling me what a menace I was, I kept staring over his heaving shoulder at the squirrel, which was lapping up the martini that had splashed inside the cage. After the Duke ran out of four-letter words he had me thrown out. We’d been pretty good friends before that, too.
I got hold of Henry as soon as I could. “I saw that girl again,” I told him, “and I grabbed her like you said.” I told him what had happened. He laughed at me. Henry always laughs at me.
“Don’t look so solemn about it, Gus!” he said, and slapped me on the back. “A little excitement is good for the blood. Laugh it off. The Duke didn’t sue you, did he?”
“No,” I said, “not exactly. But that squirrel of his ate the olive out of that cocktail that fell into his cage and got awful sick. And the Duke went and had the doctor send his bill to me. Stomach pump.”
Henry had been eating salted nuts, and when I said that he snorted half a mouthful of chewed nuts up into his nose. I’ve done that and it hurts. In a way I was glad to see Henry suffer.
“I need some help,” I told him after he got his health back. “Maybe that girl’s crazy, but I think she’s in trouble.”
“She most certainly is,” said Henry. “But I don’t see what you could do about it.”
“Oh, I’d figure out something.”
“I also don’t see why you want to help her out.”
“That’s a funny thing,” I said slowly. “You know me, Henry—I got no use for wimmen unless they leave me alone. Every time one of ’em does something nice, it’s because she’s figgerin’ to pull something lousy a little later.”
Henry swallowed some cashews carefully and then laughed. “You’ve summed up at least seven volumes of male objectivism,” he said. “But what has that got to do with your silver-haired Nemesis?”
“Nemesis? I thought maybe she was Polish. Her? Well, she’s never done anything to me that wasn’t lousy. So I figure maybe she’s different. I figure maybe she’s going to work it the other way around and pull something nice. And I want to be around when that happens.”
“Your logic is labored but dependable.” He said something else, about what’s the use of being intelligent and educated when all wisdom rests on the lips of a child of nature, but I didn’t catch on. “Well, I’m rather interested in whether or not you can do anything for her. Go ahead and stick your neck out.”
“I don’t know where she lives or nothing.”
“Oh—that.” He pulled out a little notebook and a silver pencil and wrote down something. “Here,” he said, tearing it off and handing it to me. It said, “Iola Harvester, 2336 Dungannon Street.”
“Who’s this?”
“Your damsel in distress. Your dark-eyed slapper of faces.”
“How the devil do you know her name?”
“She was a patient of mine for quite a while.”
“She was? Why you son-of-a-gun! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t you ask me?”
I started for the door, reading over the name and address. “You know what, Henry?”
“What?”
“Iola’s a pretty name.”
Henry laughed. “Let me know how you make out.”
I went up and rang the bell. It was a big apartment house; Iola lived on the fourth floor. The foyer door belched at me and I pushed it open and went in. They had one of those self-service elevators so I went up the stairs. Those things make me nervous.
She was waiting up on her floor to find out who had rung the bell. She was wearing a black housecoat that touched the floor all the way around and was close around her throat. It had a stiff collar that stuck up and out and seemed to sort of cradle her head. There was a zipper all down the front and two silver initials on the left breast. I couldn’t get my wind right away and it wasn’t the stairs.
“Oh!” she said. “It’s you!”
“Yup!” I looked at her for a minute. “Gee! I didn’t know you were so tiny!” There was something about her that made me want to laugh out loud, but not because I saw anything funny. When I said that she got pink.
“I … don’t know whether I should ask you in,” she said. “I don’t even know your name.”
“My name is Gus. So now you can ask me in.”
“You’re the only man I have ever met who can be fresh without being fresh,” she said, and stood aside. I didn’t know what she meant, but I went in, anyway. It was a nice place. Everything in it was delicate and small, like Iola. I stood in the middle of the floor spinning my hat on one finger until she took it away from me. “Sit down,” she said. I did and she did, with the room between us. “What brings you here; how did you find out my address; and will you have some coffee or a drink?”
“I came because I think you’re in a jam and you might need help. A friend of mine gave me your name and address. I don’t want any coffee and what have you got to drink?”
“Saut
erne,” she said. “Rum, rye and Scotch.”
“I never touch that stuff.”
“What do you drink?”
“Gin.” She looked startled. “Or milk. Got any milk?”
She had. She got me a great big glass of it. She even had some herself. She said, “Now, what’s on your mind?”
“I told you, Miss Iola. I want to help you.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“Oh, yes there is. There must be. If you’ll tell me what’s botherin’ you, making you hide away in … in sunflowers and runnin’ away from nothing. I’ll bet I could fix you up—What are you laughing at?”
“You’re so earnest!” she said.
“Everybody’s all the time laughing at me,” I said sadly. “Well, how about it?”
The smile faded away from her face and she sat for a long time saying nothing. I went and sat beside her and looked at her. I didn’t try to touch her at all. Suddenly she nodded and began to talk.
“I might as well tell you. It’s tough to keep it to myself. Most people would laugh at me; the one doctor I went to eventually gave me up as a bad job. He said I was kidding myself. He said that what had happened just couldn’t happen—I imagined it all. But you—I think I can trust you. I don’t know why—
“It started about two years ago. I had a slight crush on a fellow at a summer camp. He took me to a dance one night—one of those country square dances. It was a lot of fun and we danced ourselves tired. Then we went out onto the lake shore and he—well, the moon and all, you know—he put his arms around me. And just then a voice spoke to me. It said, ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep away from this fellow.’ I started back and asked the boy if he had said something. He hadn’t. I was scared and ran all the way home. He tried to catch me, but he couldn’t. I saw him the next day and tried to apologize but there wasn’t very much I could say. I tried to be nice to him, but as time went on he got more and more irritable. And he lost weight. He wound up in the hospital. Almost—died. You see, he couldn’t sleep. He was afraid to sleep. He had the most terrible dreams. I heard about one of them. It was awful.
Killdozer! Page 7
