The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  They guided the native officers back to where they said they had seen the imaginary horseman, and kept them occupied until dawn. By that time, the expedition was on the ship, native trucks and all, and safely back in space.

  The natives never recaptured their prisoner. Through that chance-in-a-million that can never be eliminated by even the most competent undercover work, he had got aboard the interstellar ship.

  The fugitive anthropoid was a young male. Physically, he appeared human enough, even almost handsome. Lean from the prison regime, he carried himself defiantly erect. Some old injury had left an ugly scar across his cheek and his thin lips had a snarling twist, but he had a poised alertness and a kind of wary grace.

  He was even sufficiently human to possess clothing and a name. His filthy garments were made of twisted animal and vegetable fibers and the skins of butchered animals. His name was Casey James.

  He was armed like some jungle carnivore, however, with a sharpened steel blade. His body, like his whole planet, was contaminated with parasitic organisms. He was quivering with fear and exhaustion, like any hunted animal, the night he blundered upon the ship. The pangs of his hunger had passed, but a bullet wound in his left arm was nagging him with unalleviated pain.

  In the darkness, he didn’t even see the ship. The trucks were stopped on the road, and the driver of the last had left it while he went ahead to help to adjust the loading ramp. The anthropoid climbed on the unattended truck and hid himself under a tarpaulin before it was driven aboard.

  Though he must have been puzzled and alarmed to find that the ship was no native conveyance, he kept hidden in the cargo hold for several days. With his animal craftiness, he milked one of the specimen animals for food, and slept in the cab of an empty truck. Malignant organisms were multiplying in his wounded arm, however, and pain finally drove him out of hiding.

  He approached the attendants who were feeding the animals, threatened them with his knife, and demanded medical care. They disarmed him without difficulty and took him to the veterinary ward. The collector found him there, already scrubbed and disinfected, sitting up in his bed.

  “Where’re we headed for?” he wanted to know.

  He nodded without apparent surprise when the collector told him the mission and the destination of the ship.

  “Your undercover work ain’t quite so hot as you seem to think,” he said. “I’ve seen your flying saucers myself.”

  “Flying saucers!” The collector sniffed disdainfully, “They aren’t anything of ours. Most of them are nothing but refracted images of surface lights, produced by atmospheric inversions. The quarantine people are getting out a book to explain that to your fellow creatures.”

  “A good one for the cops!” The anthropoid grinned. “I bet they’re still scratching their dumb skulls, over how I dodged ‘em.” He paused to finger his bandaged arm, in evident appreciation of the civilized care he had received. “And when do we get to this wonderful zoo of yours?”

  “You don’t,” the collector told him. “I did want exactly such a specimen as you are, but those stuffy bureaucrats wouldn’t let me take one.”

  “So you gotta get rid of me?”

  The psionic translator revealed the beast’s dangerous desperation, even before his hard body stiffened.

  “Wait!” The collector retreated hastily. “Don’t alarm yourself. We won’t hurt you. We couldn’t destroy you, even to escape detection. No civilized man can destroy a human life.”

  “Nothing to it,” the creature grunted. “But if you ain’t gonna toss me out in space, then what?”

  “You’ve put us in an awkward situation.” The yellow man scowled with annoyance. “If the quarantine people caught us with you aboard, they’d cancel our permits and seize everything we’ve got. Somehow, we’ll have to put you back.”

  “But I can’t go back.” The anthropoid licked his lips nervously. “I just gut-knifed a guard. If they run me down this time, it’s the chair for sure.”

  The translator made it clear that the chair was an elaborate torture machine in which convicted killers were put to a ceremonial death, according to a primitive tribal code of blood revenge.

  “So you gotta take me wherever you’re going.” The creature’s dark, frightened eyes studied the collector cunningly. “If you put me back, you’ll be killing me.”

  “On the contrary.” The collector’s thick upper lip twitched slightly, and a slow smile oozed across his wide putty face, warming everything except his frosty little eyes. “Human life is sacred. We can arrange to make you the safest creature of your kind—and also the happiest—so long as you are willing to observe two necessary conditions.”

  “Huh?” The anthropoid squinted. “Whatcha mean?”

  “You understand that we violated the quarantine in allowing you to get aboard,” the collector explained patiently. “We, and not you, would be held responsible in case of detection, but we need your help to conceal the violation. We are prepared to do everything for you, if you will make and keep two simple promises.”

  “Such as?”

  “First, promise you won’t talk about us.”

  “Easy enough.” The beast grinned. “Nobody’d believe me, anyhow.”

  “The quarantine people would.” The collector’s cold eyes narrowed. “Their undercover agents are alert for rumors of any violation.”

  “Okay, I’ll keep my mouth shut.” The creature shrugged. “What else?”

  “Second, you must promise not to kill again.” The anthropoid stiffened. “What’s it to you?”

  “We can’t allow you to destroy any more of your fellow beings. Since you are now in our hands, the guilt would fall on us.” The collector scowled at him. “Promise?”

  The anthropoid chewed thoughtfully on his thin lower lip. His hostile eyes looked away at nothing. The collector caught a faint reflection of his thoughts, through the translator, and stepped back uneasily.

  “The cops are hot behind me,” he muttered. “I gotta take care of myself.”

  “Don’t worry.” The collector snapped his fat fingers. “We can get you a pardon. Just say you won’t kill again.”

  “No.” Lean muscles tightened in the anthropoid’s jaws. “There’s one certain man I gotta knock off. That’s the main reason I busted outs the pen.”

  “Who is this enemy?” The collector frowned. “Why is he so dangerous?”

  “But he ain’t so dangerous,” the beast grunted. “I just hate his guts.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I always wanted to kick his face in.” The creature’s thin lips snarled. “Ever since we was kids together, back in Las Verdades.”

  “Yet you have never received any corrective treatment for such a monstrous obsession?” The collector shook his head incredulously, but the anthropoid ignored him.

  “His name is Gabriel Melendez,” the creature muttered. “Just a dirty greaser, but he makes out he’s just as good as me. I had money from my rich aunt and he was hungry half the time, but he’d never stay in his place. Even when he was just a snotty-nosed kid, and knew I could beat him because I was bigger, he was always trying to fight me.” The beast bared his decaying teeth. “I aim to kill him, before I’m through.”

  “Killing is never necessary,” the collector protested uneasily. “Not for civilized men.”

  “But I ain’t so civilized.” The anthropoid grinned bleakly. “I aim to gut-knife Gabe Melendez, just like I did that dumb guard.”

  “An incredible obsession!” The collector recoiled from the grim-lipped beast and the idea of such raw violence. “What has this creature done to you?”

  “He took the girl I wanted.” The beast caught a rasping breath. “And he put the cops on me. At least I think it was him, because I got caught not a month after I stuck up the filling station where he works. I think he recognized me, and I aim to get him.”

  “No—”

  “But I will!” The anthropoid slipped out of bed and stood towering
over the fat man defiantly, his free hand clenched and quivering. “You can’t stop me, not with all your fancy gadgets.”

  The beast glared down into the collector’s bright little eyes. They looked back without blinking, and their lack of brows or lashes made them seem coldly reptilian. Abruptly, the animal subsided.

  “Okay, okay!” He spat deliberately on the spotless floor and grinned at the collector’s involuntary start. “What’s it worth, to let him live?”

  The collector shook off his shocked expression.

  “We’re undercover experts and we know your planet.” A persuasive smile crept across his gross face. “Our resources are quite adequate to take care of anything you can demand. Just give your word not to kill again, or talk about us, and tell me what you want.”

  The anthropoid rubbed his hairy jaw, as if attempting to think.

  “First, I want the girl,” he muttered huskily. “Carmen Quintana was her name, before she married Gabe. She may give you a little trouble, because she don’t like me a bit. Nearly clawed my eyes out once, even back before I shot her old man at the filling station.” His white teeth flashed in a wolfish grin. “Think you can make her go for me?”

  “I think we can.” The collector nodded blandly. “We can arrange nearly anything.”

  “You’d better arrange that.” The anthropoid’s thin brown hand knotted again. “And I’ll make her sorry she ever looked at Gabe!”

  “You don’t intend to injure her?”

  “That’s my business.” The beast laughed. “Just take me to Las Verdades. That’s a little ‘dobe town down close to the border.”

  The anthropoid listed the rest of his requirements, and crossed his heart in a ritual gesture of his tribe to solemnize his promises. He knew when the interstellar craft landed again, but he had to stay aboard a long time afterwards, living like a prisoner in a sterile little cell, while he waited for the outsiders to complete their underground arrangements for his return. He was fuming with impatience, stalking around his windowless room like a caged carnivore, when the collector finally unlocked his door.

  “You’re driving me nuts,” he growled at the hairless outsider. “What’s the holdup?”

  “The quarantine people.” The collector shrugged. “We had to manufacture some new excuse for every move we made, but I don’t think they ever suspected anything. And here you are!”

  He dragged a heavy piece of primitive luggage into the room and straightened up beside it, puffing and mopping at his broad wet face.

  “Open it up,” he wheezed. “You’ll see that we intend to keep our part of the bargain. Don’t forget yours.”

  The anthropoid dropped on his knees to burrow eagerly through the garments and the simple paper documents in the bag. He looked up with a scowl.

  “Where is it?” he snapped.

  “You’ll find everything,” the fat man panted. “Your pardon papers. Ten thousand dollars in currency. Forty thousand in cashier’s checks. The clothing you specified—”

  “But where’s the gun?”

  “Everything has been arranged so that you will never need it.” The collector shifted on his feet uncomfortably. “I’ve been hoping you might change your mind about—

  “I gotta protect myself.”

  “You’ll never be attacked.”

  “You said you’d give me a gun.”

  “We did.” The collector shrugged unhappily. “You may have it, if you insist, when you leave the ship. Better get into your new clothing now. We want to take off again in half an hour.”

  The yellow Cadillac convertible he had demanded was waiting in the dark at the bottom of the ramp, its chrome trim shimmering faintly. The collector walked with him down through the airlock to the car, and handed him a heavy little package.

  “Now don’t turn on the headlamps,” the yellow man cautioned him. “Just wait here for daylight. You’ll see the Albuquerque highway then, not a mile east. Turn right to Las Verdades. We have arranged everything to keep you very happy there, so long as you don’t attempt to betray us.”

  “Don’t worry.” He grinned in the dark. “Don’t worry a minute.”

  He slid into the car and clicked on the parking lights. The instrument panel lit up like a Christmas tree. He settled himself luxuriously at the wheel, appreciatively sniffing the expensive new-car scents of leather and rubber and enamel.

  “Don’t you worry, butter-guts,” he muttered. “You’ll never know.”

  The ramp was already lifting back into the interstellar ship when he looked up. The bald man waved at him and vanished. The airlock thudded softly shut. The great disk took off into the night, silently, like something falling upward.

  The beast sat grinning in the car. Quite a deal, he was thinking. Everything he had thought to ask for, all for just a couple of silly promises they couldn’t make him keep. He already had most of his pay, and old clabber-guts would soon be forty thousand miles away, or however far it was out to the stars.

  Nobody had ever been so lucky.

  They had fixed his teeth, and put him in a hundred-dollar suit, and stuffed his pockets with good cigars. He unwrapped one of the cigars, bit off the end, lit it with the automatic lighter, and inhaled luxuriously. He had everything.

  Or did he?

  A sudden uncertainty struck him, as dawn began to break. The first gray shapes that came out of the dark seemed utterly strange, and he was suddenly afraid the outsiders had double-crossed him. Maybe they hadn’t really brought him back to Earth, after all. Maybe they had marooned him on some foreign planet, where he could never find Carmen and Gabe Melendez.

  With a gasp of alarm, he snapped on the headlights. The wide white beams washed away all that terrifying strangeness, and left only a few harmless clumps of yucca and mesquite. He slumped back against the cushions, laughing weakly.

  Now he could see the familiar peaks of Dos Lobos jutting up like jagged teeth, black against the green glass sky. He switched off the headlights and started the motor and eased the swaying car across the brown hummocks toward the dawn. In a few minutes he found the highway.

  JOSE’S OASIS, ONE STOP SERVICE,

  8 MILES AHEAD

  He grimaced at the sign, derisively. What if he had got his twenty years for sticking up the Oasis and shooting down old Jose. Who cared now if his mother and his aunt had spent their last grubby dimes, paying the lawyers to keep him out of the chair? And Carmen, what if she had spat in his face at the trial? The outsiders had taken care of everything.

  Or what if they hadn’t?

  Cautiously, he slowed the long car and pulled off the pavement where it curved into the valley. The spring rains must have already come, because the rocky slopes were all splashed with wild flowers and tinted green with new grass. The huge old cottonwoods along the river were just coming into leaf, delicately green.

  The valley looked as kind as his old mother’s face, when she was still alive, and the little town beyond the river seemed clean and lovely as he remembered Carmen. Even the sky was shining like a blue glass bowl, as if the outsiders had somehow washed and sterilized it. Maybe they had. They could do anything, except kill a man.

  He chuckled, thinking of the way old baldy had made him cross his heart. Maybe the tallow-gutted fool had really thought that would make him keep his promises. Or was there some kind of funny business about the package that was supposed to be a gun?

  He ripped it open. There in the carton was the automatic he had demanded, a .45, with an extra cartridge clip and two boxes of ammunition. It looked all right, flat and black and deadly in his hand. He loaded it and stepped out of the car to test it.

  He was aiming at an empty whisky bottle beside the pavement when he heard a mockingbird singing in the nearest cottonwood. He shot at the bird instead, and grinned when it dissolved into a puff of brown feathers.

  “That’ll be Gabe.” His hard lips curled sardonically. “Coming at me like a mad dog, if anybody ever wants to know, and I had to stop him to save my own
hide.”

  He drove on across the river bridge into Las Verdades. The outsiders had been here, he knew, because the dirt streets were all swept clean, and the wooden parts of all the low adobe buildings were bright with new paint, and all he could smell was the fragrances of coffee and hot bread, when he passed the Esperanza Cafe.

  Those good odors wet his dry mouth with saliva, but he didn’t stop to eat. With the automatic lying ready beside him on the seat, he pulled into the Oasis. The place looked empty at first and he thought for a moment that everybody was hiding from him.

  As he sat waiting watchfully, crouched down under the wheel, he had time to notice that all the shattered glass had been neatly replaced. Even the marks of his bullets on the walls had been covered with new plaster, and the whole station was shining with fresh paint, like everything else in town.

  He reached for the gun when he saw the slight dark boy coming from the grease rack, wiping his hands on a rag. It was Carmen’s brother Tony, smiling with an envious adoration at the yellow Cadillac. Tony had always been wild about cars.

  “Yes, sir! Fill her up?” Tony recognized him then, and dropped the greasy rag. “Casey James!” He ran out across the driveway. “Carmen told us you’d be home!”

  He was raising the gun to shoot when he saw that the boy only wanted to shake his hand. He hid the gun hastily; it wasn’t Tony that he had come to kill.

  “We read all about your pardon.” Tony stood grinning at him, caressing the side of the shining car lovingly. “A shame the way you were framed, but we’ll all try to make it up to you now.” The boy’s glowing eyes swept the long car. “Want me to fill her up?”

  “No!” he muttered hoarsely. “Gabe Melendez—don’t he still work here?”

  “Sure, Mr. James,” Tony drew back quickly, as if the car had somehow burned his delicate brown hands. “Eight to five, but he isn’t here yet. His home is that white stucco beyond the acequia madre.”

  “I know.”