The Lost Bradbury Page 5

  Smith’s jaw dropped. “But I saw artillery shells drop near you, and that machine-gun fire—”

  Johnny scowled. “Hey, Private Smith, look at your hand.”

  Ed’s hand was red. Shrapnel, lodged in the wrist, had drawn a quick flow of blood.

  “You should have ducked, Private Smith. Darn, I keep telling you, but you never believe me.”

  Eddie Smith gave him one of those looks. “You can’t duck bullets, Johnny.”

  Johnny laughed. It was the sound of a kid laughing. The sound of a kid who knows very well the routine of war, and how it comes and goes. Johnny laughed.

  “They didn’t argue with me, Private Smith,” he said, quietly. “None of them argued. That was funny. All the other kids used to argue about it.”

  “What other kids, Johnny?”

  “Oh, you know. The other kids. At the creek, back home. We’d always argue as to who was shot and as to who was dead. But just now, when I said Bang, you’re dead, these guys played the game right along. Not one of them argued. They didn’t any of them say, “Bang, I got you first. You’re dead!” No. They let me be the winner all the time. In the old days they used to argue so much—”

  “Did they?”

  “Sure.”

  “What was it, now, that you said to them, Johnny. Did you actually say, ‘BANG, you’re dead’?”

  “Sure.”

  “And they didn’t argue?”

  “No. Isn’t that swell of them. Next time I think it’s only fair I play dead.”

  “No,” snapped Smith. He swallowed and wiped sweat off his face. “No, don’t do that, Johnny. You—you just go on like you been going.” He swallowed again. “Now, about this business of your ducking those bullets, about them missing you….”

  “Sure they did. Sure I did.”

  * * * *

  Smith’s hands trembled.

  Johnny Choir looked at him. “What’s wrong, Private?”

  “Nothing. Just—excitement. And I was just wondering.”

  “What?”

  “Just wondering how old you are, Johnny.”

  “Me. I’m ten, going on eleven.” Johnny stopped and flushed guiltily. “No. What’s wrong with me? I’m eighteen, going on nineteen.”

  Johnny looked at the bodies of the German soldiers.

  “Tell them to get up now, Private Smith.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell them to get up. They can get up now if they want to.”

  “Yeah, well—you see, Johnny. That is. Uh. Look, Johnny, they’ll get up after we leave. Yeah, that’s it. After we leave. It’s against the—rules—for them to get up now. They want to rest awhile. Yeah—rest.”

  “Oh.”

  “See here, Johnny. I wanna tell you something right now!”

  “What?”

  Smith licked his lips and moved his feet and swallowed and cursed softly. “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Damn. Except that I’m envious of you. I—I wish I hadn’t grown up so hard and so fast. See, Johnny, you’re going to come out of this war. Don’t ask me how, I just feel you are. That’s the way the Book reads. Maybe I won’t come out. Maybe I’m not a kid. And not being a kid maybe I won’t have the protection that God gives a kid just because he is a kid. Maybe I grew up believing in the wrong things—believing in reality and things like death and bullets. Maybe I’m nuts for imagining things about you. Sure I am. Just my imagination for thinking that you’re—aw. Whatever happens, Johnny remember this, I’m going to stick by you.”

  “Sure you are. That’s the only way I’ll play,” said Johnny.

  “And if anybody so much as tries to tell you you can’t duck bullets, you know what I’m going to do?”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to kick them square in the teeth!”

  Eddie got, jerking nervous, a funny smile on his lips.

  “Now, come on, Johnny, let’s move and move fast. There’s another-game—playing over this hill.”

  Johnny got excited. “Is there?”

  “Yeah,” said Smith. “Come on.”

  They went over the hill together. Johnny Choir dancing and zigzagging and laughing, and Eddie Smith following close behind, watching him with a white face and wide, envious eyes….

  LAZARUS COME FORTH

  This was published in Planet Stories in the winter issue of 1944 and has not been previously included in any story collection.

  * * * *

  Logan’s way of laughing was bad. “There’s a new body up in the airlock, Brandon. Climb the rungs and have a look.”

  Logan’s eyes had a green shine to them, eager and intent. They were ugly, obscene.

  Brandon swore under his breath. This room of the Morgue Ship was crowded with their two personalities. Besides that, there were scores of cold shelves of bodies freezing quietly, and the insistent vibration of the coroner tables, machinery spinning under them. And Logan was like a little machine that never stopped talking.

  “Leave me alone.” Brandon rose up, tall and thinned by the years, looking as old as a pocked meteor. “Just keep quiet.”

  Logan sucked his cigarette. “Scared to go upstairs? Scared it might be your son we just picked up?”

  Brandon reached Logan in about one stride, and while the Morgue Ship slipped on through space, he clenched the coroner’s blue uniform with the small bones inside it and hung it up against the wall, pressing inward until Logan couldn’t breathe. Logan blew air, his eyes looked helpless. He tried to speak and could only grunt like a stuck pig. He waved his short arms, flapping.

  Brandon kept him there, crucified on a fist.

  “I told you. Let me search for my own son’s body in my own way. I don’t need your tongue.”

  Logan’s eyes were losing their shine, were getting blind and glazed. Brandon stepped back, releasing the little assistant. Logan bumped softly against metal flooring, his mouth hungry for air, his nostrils flaring for breath. Brandon watched the little face of Logan over the crouched, gasping body, with red color and anger shooting up into it with every passing second.

  “Coward!” he threw it out of himself, Logan did. “Got yellow—neon-tubing—for your spine. Coward. Never went to war. Never did anything for Earth against Mars.”

  Brandon said the words in slow motion. “Shut up.”

  “Why?” Logan crept back, inching up the metal hull. The blood pumps under the skirts of the tables pulsed across the warm silence. “Does it hurt, the truth? Your son’d be proud of you, okay. Ha!” He coughed and spat. “He was so damn ashamed of you he went and signed up for space combat. So he got lost from his ship during a battle.” Logan licked his lips very carefully. “So, to make up for it, you signed on a Morgue Ship. Try to find his body. Try to make amends. I know you. You wouldn’t join the Space Warriors to fight. No guts for that. Had to get a nice easy job on a morgue ship—”

  Lines appeared in Brandon’s gaunt cheeks, his eyes were closed, the lids pale. He said, and tried to believe it himself, “Someone has to pick up the bodies after the battle. They can’t go flying on forever in their own orbits. They deserve burial.”

  The bitterness of Logan struck even deeper. “Who are you tryin’ to convince?” He was on his feet now. “Me, it’s different. I got a right to running this ship. I was in the other war.”

  “You’re a liar,” Brandon retorted. “You hunted radium in the asteroids with a mineral tug. You took this Morgue Ship job so you could go right on hunting radium, picking up bodies on the side.”

  Logan laughed softly, but not humorously. “So what? Least I’m no coward. I’ll burn anybody gets in my way.” He thought it over. “Unless,” he added, “they give me a little money.”

  Brandon turned away, feeling ill. He forced himself to climb up the rungs toward that air-lock, w
here that fresh body lay, newly still-born from space by the retrieving-claw. His palms left wet shining prints on the rungs. His climbing feet made a soft noise in the cold metal silence.

  The body lay in the cold air-lock’s center, as thousands had lain before. Its posture was one of easy slumber, relaxed and not speaking ever again.

  * * * *

  Brandon took in his breath. Numbly he realized it was not his son. Every time a new body was found he feared and yet hoped it would be Richard. Richard of the easy laughter and good smile and dark curly hair. Richard who was now floating off somewhere toward some far eternity.

  Brandon’s eyes dilated. He went to his knees and with efficient darts of his eyes, he covered the vital points of this strange uniform with the young body inside it. His heart pounded briefly, and when he got up again he acted like he had been struck in the face. He walked unsteadily to the rungs.

  “Logan,” he called down the hole in a numbed voice. “Logan, come up here. Quick.”

  Logan climbed lazily up, emitting grunts and smoke.

  “Look here,” said Brandon, kneeling again by the body.

  Logan looked and didn’t believe it. “Where in hell’d you get that?”

  Lying there, the face of the body was like snow framed by the ebon-black of the hair. The eyes were blue jewels caught in the snow. There were slender fingers reclining against the hips. But, most important of all, was the cut of the silver metal uniform, the grey leather belt and the bronze triangle over the silent heart with the numerals 51 on it.

  Logan held onto the rungs. “Three hundred years old,” he whispered it. “Three hundred years old,” he said.

  “Yes.” The Numerals 51 were enough for Brandon. “After all these centuries, and in perfect condition. Look how calm he is. Most corpse faces aren’t—pretty. Something happened, three hundred years ago, and he’s been drifting, alone, ever since. I—” Brandon caught his breath.

  “What’s wrong?” snapped Logan.

  “This man,” said Brandon, wonderingly, “committed suicide.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “There’s not a mark of decompression, centrifugal force, disintegrator or ray-burn on him. He simply stepped out of a ship. Why should a Scientist of the 51 Circle commit suicide?”

  “They had wars back there, too,” said Logan. “But this is the first time I ever seen a stiff from one of them. It can’t happen. He shoulda been messed up by meteors.”

  A strange prickling crept over Brandon. “When I was a kid, I remember thumbing through history books, reading about those famous 51 Scientists of the Circle who were doing experimental work on Pluto back in the year 2100. I memorized their uniforms, and this bronze badge. I couldn’t mistake it. There was a rumor that they were experimenting with some new universal power weapon.”

  “A myth,” said Logan.

  “Who knows? Maybe. Maybe not. But before that super weapon was completed, Earth fell beneath Mar’s assault. The 51-scientists destroyed themselves and their Base when the Martians came. The—myth—says that if the Martians had been only a month later—the weapon would have been out of blueprint and into metal.”

  Brandon stopped talking and looked at the long-boned, easily slumbering Scientist.

  “And now he shows up. One of the original 51. I wonder what happened? Maybe he tried to reach Earth and had to leap into space to escape the Martians. Logan, we’ve got history with us, pulled in out of space, cold and stark under our hands.”

  Logan laughed uneasily. “Yeah. Now, if we only had that weapon. Baby, that’d be something to sing about, by God.”

  Brandon jerked.

  Logan looked at him. “What’s eating you?”

  Brandon laid his fingers on the dead Scientist’s skull.

  “Maybe—just maybe—we have got the weapon,” he said.

  His hand trembled.

  * * * *

  The coroner pumps throbbed warmly under the table, while manipulating tendrils darted swiftly, effectively over the dead Scientist’s body. Brandon moved, too, like a machine. In a regular fury he had forced Logan to hurry the body down into the preparations room, inject adrenalin, thermal units, apply the blood pump and accomplish a thousand other demanding and instantaneous tasks.

  “Now, out of the way, Logan. You’re more trouble than help!”

  Logan stumbled back. “Okay, okay. Don’t get snotty. It won’t work. I keep telling you. All these years.”

  Brandon could see nothing. Logan’s voice was muffled, far away. There was only the surge of pumps, the sweating heat of the little cubicle, and niche number 12 waiting to receive this body if he failed. Brandon swallowed, tightly. Niche number 12 waiting, cold, ready, waiting for a body to fill it. He’d have to fight to keep it empty.

  He began to sing-song words over and over as he injected stimulants into the body. He didn’t know where the words came from, from childhood, maybe, from his old religious memories:

  “Lazarus come forth,” Brandon said softly, bending close, adjusting the manipulatory tendrils. “Lazarus, come forth.”

  Logan snorted. “Lazarus! Will you can that!”

  Brandon had to talk to himself. “Inside his brain he’s got that energy weapon that Earth can use to end the war. It’s been frozen in there three hundred years. If we can thaw it out—”

  “Who ever heard of reviving a body after that long?”

  “He’s perfectly preserved. Perfectly frozen. Oh, God, this is Fate. I know it. I feel it. Came to find Richard and I found something bigger! Lazarus! Lazarus, come forth from the tomb!”

  The machines thrummed louder, beating into his ears. Brandon listened, watched for just one pulse, just one beat, one word, one moment of life.

  “Air for the lungs,” and Brandon attached oxygen cones over the fine nose and relaxed lips. “Pressure on the ribs.” Metal plates pressuring the rib case slowly out and in. “Circulation.” Brandon touched the control at the foot of the table and the whole table tilted back and forth in a whining teeter-tauter.

  A report clipped through on the audio:

  “Morgue Ship. Battle Unit 766 calling Morgue Ship. Off orbit of Pluto 234CC, point zero-two, off 32, one by seven, follow up. Battle just terminated. Six Martian ships destroyed. One Earth ship blasted apart and bodies thrown into space. Please recover. 79 men. Bodies in orbit heading toward sun at 23456 an hour. Check.”

  Logan flipped his cigarette away. “That’s us. We got work to do. Come on. Let that stiff cool. He’ll be here when we come back.”

  “No!” Brandon fairly shouted it, eyes wild. “He’s more important than all those men out there. We can help them later. He can help us now!”

  The table came to a halt, bringing absolute silence.

  Brandon bent forward to press his ear against the warmed rib-casing.

  “Wait.”

  There it was. Unbelievably, there it was. A tiny pulse stirring like a termite down under, softly and sluggishly moving through the body, jabbing the heart and—NOW! Brandon cried out. He was shaking all over. He was setting the machine in operation again, and talking and laughing and going crazy with it.

  “He’s alive! He’s alive! Lazarus has come from the tomb! Lazarus reborn again! Notify Earth immediately!”

  * * * *

  At the end of an hour, the pulse was timing normal, the temperature was lowering down from a fever, and Brandon moved about the preparations’ room watching every quiver of the body’s internal organs through the tubular-fluoroscope.

  He exulted. This was having Richard alive again. It was compensation. You roared into space looking somewhere for your lost self-respect, your pride, looking for your son who is shooting on some soundless orbit into nothing, and now the biggest child of Fate is deposited in your arms to warm and bring to life. It was imposs
ible. It was good. Brandon almost laughed. He almost forgot he had ever known fear of death. This was conquering it. This was like bringing Richard back to life, but even more. It meant things to earth and humanity; things about weapons and power and peace.

  Logan interrupted Brandon’s exultant thinking by blowing smoke in his face. “You know something, Brandy? This is damn good! You done something, Mister. Yeah.”

  “I thought I told you to notify Earth.”

  “Ah, I been watching you. Like a mama hen and her chick. I been thinking, too. Yeah.” Logan shook ashes off his smoke. “Ever since you pulled in this prize fish, I been turning it over in my mind.”

  “Go up to the radio room and call Earth. We’ve got to rush the Scientist to Moon Base immediately. We can talk later.”

  There was that hard green shine to Logan’s narrow eyes again. He poked a finger at Brandon. “Here’s the way I get it. Do we get rewarded for finding this guy? Hell, no. It’s our routine work. We’re supposed to pick up bodies. Here we got a guy who’s the key to the whole damn war.”

  Brandon’s lips hardly moved. “Call Earth.”

  “Now, hold on a moment, Brandy. Let me finish this. I been thinking, maybe the Martians’d like to own him, too. Maybe they’d like to be around when he starts talking.”

  Brandon made a fist. “You heard what I said.”

  Logan put his hand behind him. “I just want to talk peaceable with you, Brandy. I don’t want trouble. But all we’ll get for finding this stiff is a kiss on the cheek and a medal on the chest. Hell!”

  Brandon was going to hit him hard, before he saw the gun in Logan’s fingers, whipped out and pointing.

  “Take a look at this, Brandy, and don’t lose your supper.”

  In spite of himself, Brandon quailed. It was almost an involuntary action. His whole body plunged back, aching, pulling with it.

  “Now, let’s march up to the radio room. I got a little calling to do. Get on with you. Hup!”

  In the radio-room, Logan touched studs, raised a mike to his lips and said:

  “Beam to Mars. Beam to Mars. Morgue Ship of Earth calling. Mars Beam answer.”