The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

He gunned the car. It lurched back into the street, roared across the acequia bridge, skidded to a screaming stop in front of the white stucco. He dropped the gun into the side pocket of his coat and ran to the door, grinning expectantly.

  Gabe would be taken by surprise. The outsiders had set it up for him very cleverly, with all their manufactured evidences that he had been innocent of any crime at all, and Gabe wasn’t likely to be armed.

  The door opened before he could touch the bell, but it was only Carmen. Carmen, pale without her makeup but beautiful anyhow, yawning sleepily in sheer pink pajamas that were half unbuttoned. She gasped when she saw him.

  “Casey!” Strangely, she was smiling. “I knew you’d come!”

  She swayed toward him eagerly, as if she expected him to take her in his arms, but he stood still, thinking of how she had watched him in the courtroom, all through his trial for killing her father, with pitiless hate in her dark eyes. He didn’t understand it, but old puffy-guts had somehow changed her.

  “Oh!” She turned pink and buttoned her pajamas hastily. “No wonder you were staring, but I’m so excited. I’ve been longing for you so. Come on in, darling. I’ll get something on and make us some breakfast.”

  “Wait a minute!”

  He shook his head, scowling at her, annoyed at the outsiders. They had somehow cheated him. He wanted Carmen, but not this way. He wanted to fight Gabe to take her. He wanted her to go on hating him, so that he would have to beat and frighten her. Old blubber-belly had been too clever and done too much.

  “Where’s Gabe?” He reached in his pocket to grip the cold gun. “I gotta see Gabe.”

  “Don’t worry, darling.” Her tawny shoulders shrugged becomingly. “Gabriel isn’t here. He won’t be here any more. You see, dear, the state cops talked to me a lot while they were here digging up the evidence to clear you. It came over me then that you had always been the one I loved. When I told Gabriel, he moved out. He’s living down at the hotel now, and we’re getting a divorce right away, so you don’t have to worry about him.”

  “I gotta see him, anyhow.”

  “Don’t be mean about it, darling.” Her pajamas were coming open again, but she didn’t seem to care. “Come on in, and let’s forget about Gabriel. He has been so good about everything, and I know he won’t make us any trouble.”

  “I’ll make the trouble.” He seized her bare arm. “Come along.”

  “Darling, don’t!” She hung back, squirming. “You’re hurting me!”

  He made her shut up, and dragged her out of the house. She wanted to go back for a robe, but he threw her into the car and climbed over her to the wheel. He waited for her to try to get out, so that he could slap her down, but she only whimpered for a Kleenex and sat there sniffling.

  Old balloon-belly had ruined everything.

  He tried angrily to clash the gears, as he started off, as if that would damage the outsiders, but the Hydramatic transmission wouldn’t clash, and anyhow the saucer ship was probably somewhere out beyond the moon by now.

  “There’s Gabriel,” Carmen sobbed. “There, crossing the street, going to work. Don’t hurt him, please!”

  He gunned the car and veered across the pavement to run him down, but Carmen screamed and twisted at the wheel. Gabriel managed to scramble out of the way. He stopped on the sidewalk, hatless and breathless but grinning stupidly.

  “Sorry, mister. Guess I wasn’t looking—” Then Gabriel saw who he was. “Why, Casey! We’ve been expecting you back. Seems you’re the lucky one, after all.” Gabriel had started toward the car, but he stopped when he saw the gun. His voice went shrill as a child’s. “What are you doing?”

  “Just gut-shooting another dirty greaser, that’s all.”

  “Darling!” Carmen snatched at the gun. “Don’t—” He slapped her down.

  “Don’t strike her!” Gabriel stood gripping the door of the car with both hands. He looked sick. His twitching face was bright with sweat, and he was gasping hoarsely for his breath. He was staring at the gun, his wide eyes dull with horror.

  “Stop me!”

  He smashed the flat of the gun into Carmen’s face, and grinned at the way Gabriel flinched when she screamed.

  This was more the way he wanted everything to be. “Just try and stop me!”

  “I—I won’t fight you,” Gabriel croaked faintly. “After all, we’re not animals. We’re civilized humans. I know Carmen loves you. I’m stepping out of the way. But you can’t make me fight—”

  The gun stopped Gabriel.

  Queerly, though, he didn’t fall. He just stood there like some kind of rundown machine, with his stiffened hands clutching the side of the car.

  “Die, damn you!”

  Casey James shot again; he kept on shooting till the gun was empty. The bullets hammered into the body, but somehow it wouldn’t fall. He leaned to look at the wounds, at the broken metal beneath the simulated flesh of the face and the hot yellow hydraulic fluid running out of the belly, and recoiled from what he saw, shaking his head, shuddering like any trapped and frightened beast.

  “That—thing!”

  With a wild burst of animal ferocity, he hurled the gun into what was left of its plastic face. It toppled stiffly backward then, and something jangled faintly inside when it struck the pavement.

  “It—it ain’t human!”

  “But it was an excellent replica.” The other thing, the one he had thought was Carmen, gathered itself up from the bottom of the car, speaking gently to him with what now seemed queerly like the voice of old barrel-belly. “We had taken a great deal of trouble to make you the happiest one of your breed.” It looked at him sadly with, Carmen’s limpid dark eyes. “If you had only kept your word.”

  “Don’t—” He cowered back from it, shivering. “Don’t k-k-kill me!”

  “We never kill,” it murmured. “You need never be afraid of that.”

  While he sat trembling, it climbed out of the car and picked up the ruined thing that had looked like Gabe and carried it easily away toward the Oasis garage.

  Now he knew that this place was only a copy of Las Verdades, somewhere not on Earth. When he looked up at the blue crystal sky, he knew that it was only some kind of screen. He felt the millions of strange eyes beyond it, watching him like some queer monster in a cage.

  He tried to run away.

  He gunned the Cadillac back across the acequia bridge and drove wildly back the way he had come in, on the Alburquerque highway. A dozen miles out, an imitation construction crewman tried to flag him down, pointing at a sign that said the road was closed for repairs. He whipped around the barriers and drove the pitching car on across the imitation desert until he crashed into the bars.

  The Cold Green Eye

  • • •

  "Kansas?” The boy looked hard at his teacher. "Where is Kansas?”

  “I do riot know.” The withered old monk shrugged vaguely. “The spring caravan will carry you down out of our mountains. A foreign machine called a railway train will take you to a city named Calcutta. The lawyers there will arrange for your journey to Kansas.”

  “But I love our valley.” Tommy glanced out at the bamboo plumes nodding above the old stone walls of the monastery garden and the snowy Himalaya towering beyond. He turned quickly back to catch the holy man’s leathery hand. “Why must I be sent away?”

  “A matter of money and the law.”

  “I don’t understand the law,” Tommy said. “Please can’t I stay? That’s all I want—to be here with the monks of Mahavira, and play with the village children, and study my lessons with you.”

  “We used to hope that you might remain with us to become another holy man.” Old Chandra Sha smiled wistfully behind the cloth that covered his mouth to protect the life of the air from injury by his breath. “We have written letters about your unusual aptitudes, but the lawyers in Calcutta show little regard for the ancient arts and those in Kansas none at all. You are to go.”

  “I don’t need mon
ey,” Tommy protested. “My friends in the village will give me rice, and I can sleep in the courtyard here—”

  "I think there is too much money, burdening souls with evil karma,” the lean old man broke in softly, “Your father • was a famous traveler, who gathered dangerous riches. Since the wheel has turned for him, others desire his fortune. I think perhaps that is why the lawyers sent for you.”

  A fly came buzzing around his dried-up face, and he paused to wave it very gently away.

  “Your mother’s sister lives in that place named Kansas,” he went on. “It is arranged for you to go to her. She is your own race and blood, and she wants you in her home—”

  “Nol She never even saw me,” Tommy whispered bitterly. “She couldn’t really want me. Must I go?”

  “It is to be.” Chandra Sha nodded firmly. "Your people are ignorant about the true principles of matter and the soul, but their own peculiar laws require obedience. The caravan leaves tomorrow.”

  Tommy wanted not to weep, but he was only ten. He clung sobbing to the thin old Jain.

  “We have instructed you well,” the holy man murmured, trying to comfort him. “Your feet are already on the pathway to nirvana, and I will give you a copy of the secret book of Rishabha to guide and guard you on your way.”

  Tommy went down out of the mountains with the caravan. He was bewildered and afraid, and the motion of the railway cars made him ill, but the lawyers in Calcutta were kind enough. They bought him new garments, and took him to a cinema, and put him on a great strange machine called an airplane. At last he came to Kansas and his Aunt Agatha Grimm.

  He rode from the depot to her home in a jolting farm truck, peering out at the strange sun-flooded flatness of the land and a monstrous orange-painted machine called a combine that grazed like the golden bull of Rishabha through the ripe wheat.

  The hired man stopped the truck beside a huge wooden house that stood like a fort in the middle of the endless land, and Tommy’s aunt came out to greet him with a moist kiss. A plump, pink-skinned blonde, with a sweet, smooth, sweat-beaded face. He was used to darker women, and she seemed incredibly fair.

  “So you’re Lizzie’s boy?” She and her sister had come from Alabama, and soft Negro accents still echoed in her voice. “Gracious, honey, what’s the matter?”

  Tommy had run to meet her eagerly, but he couldn’t help shrinking back when he saw her eyes. The left was warm and brown and kind as old Chandra Sha’s. But the right eye was different, a frosty, greenish blue; it seemed to look straight through him.

  “Well, child, can’t you talk?”

  He gulped and squirmed, trying to think of words to say in English. But he couldn’t think at all. Somehow, the blue eye froze him.

  “Nothing,” he muttered at last. “Just—nothing.”

  “Lizzie’s boy would be a little odd.” She smiled, too sweetly. "Brought up by jabbering heathens! But this is going to be your home, you know. Come on inside. Let me clean you up.”

  The hired man brought the carved teakwood chest the monks had given him, and they went into the big house. The smell of it was strange and stale. The windows were closed, with blinds drawn down. Tommy stood blinking at the queer heavy furniture and dusty bric-a-brac crammed into the dim cave of the living room, until he heard a fly buzzing at the screen door behind him. He turned without thinking to help it escape.

  "Wait, honey.” His aunt caught his arm, to seat him firmly on the teakwood chest. “I'll kill it!”

  She snatched a swatter from the high oak mantle and stalked the fly through the gloomy jungle of antimacassared chairs and fussy little tables to a darkened window. The swatter fell with a vicious thwack.

  “Got him!” she said. “I won’t endure flies.”

  “But, Aunt Agatha!” The English words were coming back, though his thoughts were still in the easy vernacular the monks had taught him. His shy, hesitant voice was shocked. “They, too, are alive.”

  The brown eye, as well as the blue, peered sharply at him. His aunt sat down suddenly, gasping as if she needed fresh air. He wanted to open the windows, but he was afraid to move.

  “Thomas, honey, you’re upsetting me terribly.” Her pale fat hands fluttered nervously. “I guess you didn’t know that I’m not well at all. Of course I love children as much as anybody, but I really don’t know if I can endure you in the house. I always said myself that you’d be better off in some nice orphanage.”

  Or back with the monks, Tommy told himself unhappily. He couldn’t help thinking that she looked as tough and strong as a mountain pony, but he decided not to say so.

  “But sick as I am, I’ll take you in.” Her moist, swollen lips tried to smile. “Because you’re Lizzie’s boy. It’s my duty, and the legal papers are all signed. The judge gave me full control of you, and your estate, till you come of age. Just keep that in mind.”

  Nodding miserably, Tommy huddled smaller on the chest.

  “I’m giving you a decent home, so you ought to be grateful.” A faint indignation began to edge her voice. “I never approved when Lizzie ran away to marry a good-for-nothing explorer—not even if his long-winded books did make them rich. Served her right when they got killed, trying to climb them foreign mountains. I guess she never had a thought of me—her wandering like a gypsy queen through all them wicked heathen countries, never sending me a penny. A lot she cared if her own born sister had to drudge away like a common hired girl!”

  Sudden tears shone in the one brown eye, but the other remained dry and hard as glass.

  “What I can’t forgive is all she did to you.” Aunt Agatha snuffled and dabbled at her fat, pink nose. “Carrying you to all those outlandish foreign places. Letting you associate with all sorts of nasty natives. The lawyers said you’ve had no decent religious training. I guess you’ve picked up goodness knows what superstitious notions. But 1’U see you get a proper education.”

  “Thank you very much!” Tommy sat up hopefully. “I want to learn. Chandra Sha was teaching me Sanskrit and Arabic. I can speak Swahili and Urdu, and I’m studying the secret book of Rishabha—”

  “Heathen idolatry!” The blue eye and the brown widened in alarm. "Wicked nonsense you’ll soon forget, here in Kansas. Simple reading and writing and arithmetic will do for the like of you, and a Christian Sunday school.”

  “But Rishabha was the first Thirtankara,” Tommy protested timidly. “The greatest of the saints. The first to find nirvana.”

  “You little infidel!” Aunt Agatha’s round pink face turned red. “But you won’t find—whatever you call it. Not here in Kansas! Now bring your things up to your room.”

  Staggering with the teakwood chest, he followed her up to a narrow attic room. Hot as an oven, it had a choking antiseptic smell. The dismal, purple-flowered wallpaper was faded and water-stained. At the tiny window, a discouraged fly hummed feebly.

  Aunt Agatha went after it.

  “Don’t!” Tommy dropped the chest and caught at her swatter. "Please, may I just open the window and let it go?”

  “Gracious child! What on earth?”

  “Don’t you know about flies?” A sudden determination steadied his shy voice. "They, too, have souls. And it is wrong to kill them.”

  "Honey child, are you insane?”

  "All life is akin, through the Cycle of Birth,” he told her desperately. “The holy Jains taught me that. As the wheel of life turns, our souls go from one form to another—until each is purged of every karma, so that it can rise to nirvana.”

  She stood motionless, with the swatter lifted, frozen with astonishment.

  “When you kill a fly,” he said, “you are loading your own soul with bad karma. Besides, you may be injuring a friend.”

  “Well, I never!” The swatter fell out of her shocked hand. Tommy picked it up and gave it back to her, politely. “Such wicked heathen foolery! We’ll pray, tonight, to help you find the truth.”

  Tommy shuddered, as she crushed the weary fly.

  "Now, un
pack your box,” she commanded. “I’ll have no filthy idols here.”

  “Please,” he protested unhappily. “These things are my own.

  The blue eye was still relentless, but the brown one began to cry. Tears ran down her smooth face, and her heavy bosom quaked.

  “Tommy! How can you be so mulish? When I’m only trying to take your poor dead mother’s place, and me such an invalid.”

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I hope your health improves. I’ll show you everything.”

  The worn key hung on a string around his neck. He unlocked the chest, but she found no idols. His clothing she took to be laundered, lifting each piece gingerly with two fingers as if it had been steeped in corruption. She sniffed at a fragrant packet of dried herbs, and seized it to be burned.

  Finally she bent to peer at the remaining odds and ends— the brushes and paints his mother had given him when she left him with the monks, a few splotched watercolors he had tried to make of the monastery and the mountains and his village friends, the broken watch the mountaineers had found beside his father’s body, a thick painted cylinder.

  “That?” She pointed at his picture of a shy brown child. "Who’s that nigger girl?”

  “Mira Bai was not a Negro.” He covered the picture quickly with another, to hide it from that cold blue eye. “She lived in my own village. She was my teacher’s niece.

  We used to study together. But her legs were withered and she was never strong. Last year before the rains were ended the wheel turned for her.”

  “What wheel?" Aunt Agatha sniffed. “Do you mean she’s dead?”

  “The soul never dies,” Tommy answered firmly. “It always returns in a new body, until it escapes to nirvana. Mira Bai has a stronger body now, because she was good. I don’t know where she is—maybe here in Kansas! Someday I’ll find her, with the science of Rishabha.”

  "You poor little fool!” Aunt Agatha stirred his small treasures with the swatter handle, and jabbed at the painted cylinder. “Now what’s that contraption?”

  “Just—a book.”