The Lost Bradbury Page 6

  After an interval, Mars gave answer. Logan said:

  “I’ve just picked up the body of a 51 Circle Scientist. He’s been resuscitated. Give me your fleet commander. I got things to talk over with him.” Logan smiled. “Oh, hello, commander!”

  * * * *

  Half an hour later, the discussions were over, the plans made. Logan hung up, satisfied. Brandon looked at him as if he couldn’t believe he was serious.

  Back down in the control room, Logan set a course, and then forced Brandon to get the body ready. He bragged about the deal. “A half ton of radium, Brandy. Not bad, eh? Good pay. More than Earth’d ever give me for my routine duty.”

  Brandon shuddered. “You fool. The Martians will kill us.”

  “Uh-uh.” Logan pantomimed him into moving the body onto a rollered table and taking it to the emergency life-craft airlock. “I’m not that dumb. I’m having you wire this emergency life-boat with explosive. We collect the minerals first. We blow up the body if the Martians act funny. We make them wait until we’ve collected our half and gotten five hours’ start toward Earth before we allow them to pick up the body. Nice, huh?”

  Brandon swayed over the task of wiring the lifeboat with explosive. “You’re cutting your own throat. Handing over a weapon like that to the Martian enemy.”

  It was no again from Logan. “After the Martians pick up the body and we’re safely on our way home to Earth, I press a button and the whole damn thing blows up. They call it double-crossing.”

  “Destroy the body?”

  “Hell, yes. Think I want a weapon like that turned over to the enemy? Guh!”

  “The war’ll go on for years.”

  “So Earth’ll wind up winning, anyhow. We’re getting along, slow but sure. And when the war’s over, I got a load of radium to set myself up in business and a big future in front of me.”

  “So you kill millions of men, for that.”

  “What’d they do for me? Ruined my guts in the last war!”

  There had to be some argument, something to say, quick, something to do to a man like Logan. Brandon thought, quickly. “Look, Logan, we can work this, but save the body.”

  “Don’t be funny.”

  “Put one of the other bodies in the ship we send out. Save Lazarus’ body and run hack to Earth with it!” insisted Brandon.

  The little assistant shook his head. “The Martians’ll have an intra-material beam focused on the emergency ship when they get within one hundred thousand miles of her. They’ll be able to tell then if the Body’s dead or alive. No dice, Brandy.”

  It was hardly like leaping himself, thought Brandon. It was just frustration and rage and unthinking action. Brandon jumped. Logan hardly flicked an eyelid as he pressed the trigger of his paragun. It paralyzed the legs from under Brandon and he collapsed. The gun sprayed over his groin and chest and face, too, in a withering shower of red-hot needles. The lights went out.

  * * * *

  There was a loose sensation of empty space, and acceleration minus power. Pure soundless momentum. Brandon forced his eyes open painfully, and found himself alone in the preparations’ room, lying stretched upon one of the coroner tables, bound with metal fibre.

  “Logan!” he bellowed it up through the ship. He waited. He did it again. “Logan!”

  He fought the metal fibre, knotting his fists, twisting his arms. He yanked himself back and forth. It pretty well held, except for a looseness in the right hand binding. He worked on that. Upstairs, a queer, detached Martian bass voice intoned itself.

  “500,000 miles. Prepare your emergency craft with the body of the Scientist inside of it, Morgue Ship. At 300,000 miles, release the emergency craft. We’ll release our mineral payment ship now, giving you a half hour leeway to pick it up. It contains the exact amount you asked for.”

  Logan’s voice next:

  “Good. The Scientist is alive, still, and doing well. You’re getting a bargain.”

  Brandon’s face whitened, bringing out all the hard, scared bones of it, the cheeks and brow and chin bones. He jerked against the binding and it only jumped the air from his lungs so he sobbed. Breathing deeply, he lay back. They were taking his child back out into space. Lazarus, his second son, whom he had birthed out of space with a metal retriever, they were taking back out and away from him. You can’t have your real son; so you take the second best and you slap him into breathing life, into breathing consciousness, and before he is a day old they try to tear him away from you again. Brandon fairly yelled against his manacles of wire. Sweat came down his face, and the stuff from his eyes wasn’t all sweat.

  Logan tiptoed down the hard rungs, grinning.

  “Awake, Sleeping Beauty?”

  Brandon said nothing. His right hand was loosened. It was wet and loosened, working like a small white animal at his side, slipping from its wire trap.

  “You can’t go ahead with it, Logan.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Earth Tribunal will find out.”

  “You won’t tell them.” Logan was doing something across the room. He was the only moving thing in front of a hundred cold shelves of sleeping warriors.

  Brandon gasped, tried to get up, fell back. “How’ll you fake my death?”

  “With an injection of sulfacardium. Heart failure. Too much pulse on a too old heart. Simple.” Logan turned and there was a hypodermic in his hand.

  Brandon lay there. The ship went on and on. The body was upstairs, lying breathing in its metal cradle, mothered by him and jerked to life by him, and now going away. Brandon managed to say:

  “Do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Give me the drug now. I don’t want to be awake when you send Lazarus out. I don’t want that.”

  “Sure.” Logan came walking across the deck, raising the hypodermic. It glittered hard and silver fine, and sharp.

  “One more thing, Logan.”

  “Hurry it up!”

  Only one arm free, one leg able to move slightly. Logan was pressing against the table, now. The hypodermic hesitated in his fingers.

  “This!” said Brandon.

  * * * *

  With one foot, Brandon kicked the teeter-tauter control at the base of the board. The board, whining, began to elevate swiftly. With his free arm, instantly pulling the last way free from the wire, Brandon clutched Logan’s screaming head and jammed it down under the table, under the descending board. Board and metal base ground together and kept on going three inches. Logan screamed only once. The sounds after that were so horrible that Brandon retched. Logan’s body slumped and hung, arms slack, hypo dropped and shattered on the deck.

  The whole table kept going up and down, up and down.

  It made Brandon sicker with each movement. The whole room revolved, tipped, spun sickishly. The corpses in all their niches seemed to shiver with it.

  He managed to kick the control to neutral and the table poised, elevated at the heels, so blood pounded hotly into Brandon’s pale face, lighting, coloring it. His heart was pounding furiously and the chronometer upon the hull-wall clicked out time passing, time passing and miles with it, and Martians coming so much the closer….

  He fought the remaining wires continuously, cursing, bringing threads and beads of blood from raw wrist, ankle and hips. Red lights buzzed like insects on the ceiling, spelling out:

  “ROCKET COMING…UN-KNOWN CRAFT…ROCKET APPROACHING….”

  Hold on, Lazarus. Don’t let them wake you all the way up. Don’t let them take you. Better for you to go on slumbering forever.

  The wire on his left wrist sprang open. It took another five minutes to bleed himself out of the ankle wires. The ship spun on, all too quickly.

  Not looking at Logan’s body, Brandon sprang from the table and with an infinite w
eariness tried to speed himself up the rungs. His mind raced ahead, but his body could only sludge rung after rung upward into the radio room. The door to the emergency rocket boat was wide and inside, living quietly, cheeks pink, pulse beating softly in throat, Lazarus lay unthinking, unknowing that his new father had come into his presence.

  Brandon glanced at his wrist chronometer. Almost time to slam that door, shoving Lazarus out into space to meet the Martians. Five minutes.

  He stood there, sweating. Then, decided, he put a tight audio beam straight on through to green Earth. Earth.

  “Morgue Ship coming home. Morgue Ship coming home! Important cargo. Important cargo. Please meet us off the Moon!”

  Setting the ship controls into an automatic mesh, he felt the thundering jets explode to life under him. It was not alone their shaking that pulsed through his body. It was something of himself, too. He was sick. He wanted to get back to Earth so badly he was violently ill with the desire. To forget all of war and death.

  He could give Lazarus to the enemy and then turn homeward. Yes, he supposed he could do that. But, give up a second son where you already have given up one? No. No. Or, destroy the body now? Brandon fingered a ray-gun momentarily. Then he threw it away from him, eyes closed, swaying. No.

  And if he should try to run away to Earth now? The Martians would pursue and capture him. There was no speed in a Morgue Ship to outdistance superior craft.

  Brandon walked unsteadily to the side of the sleeping Scientist. He watched him a moment, touching him, looking at him with a lost light in his eyes.

  Then, he began the final preparations, lifting the Scientist, going toward the life rocket.

  * * * *

  The Martians intercepted the emergency life-rocket at 5199CVZ. The Morgue Ship itself was nowhere visible. It had already completed its arc and was driving back toward Earth.

  The body of Lazarus was hurried into the hospital cubicle of the Martian rocket. The body was laid upon a table, and immediate efforts were made to bring it out of its centuries of rest.

  Lazarus reclined, silver uniform belted across the middle with soft mouse-grey leather, bronze symbol 51 over the heart.

  Breathlessly, the Martians crowded in about the body, probing, examining, trying, waiting. The room got very warm. The little purple eyes blinked hot and tensed.

  Lazarus was breathing deeply now, sighing into full aware life, Lazarus coming from the tomb. After three hundred years of avoid death.

  Armed guards stood on both sides of the medical table, weapons poised, torture mechanisms ready to make Lazarus speak if he refused to tell.

  The eyes of Lazarus fluttered open. Lazarus out of the tomb. Lazarus seeing his companions, iris widening upon itself, forcing shape out of mist. Seeing the curious blue skulls of anxious Martians collected in a watching crowd about him. Lazarus living, breathing, ready to speak.

  Lazarus lifted his head, curiously, parted his lips, wetted them with his tongue, and then spoke. His first words were:

  “What time is it?”

  It was a simple sentence, and all of the Martians bent forward to catch its significance as one of the Martians replied:

  “23:45.”

  Lazarus nodded and closed his eyes and lay back. “Good. He’s safe then, by now. He’s safe.”

  The Martians closed in, waiting for the next important words of the waking dead.

  Lazarus kept his eyes closed, and he trembled a little, as if, in spite of himself, he couldn’t help it.

  He said:

  “My name is Brandon.”

  Then, Lazarus laughed….

  UNDERSEA GUARDIANS

  Published in Amazing Stories in December 1944, “Undersea Guardians” was later on reprinted in January 1968 in the magazine Fantastic and included in three anthologies, The Second Book of Unknown Tales of Horror (1978), Mysterious Sea Stories (1985), and Combat! Great Tales of World War II (1992).

  * * * *

  The ocean slept quietly. There was little movement in its deep green silence. Along the floor of a watery valley some bright flecks of orange colour swam: tiny arrow-shaped fish. A shark prowled by, gaping its mouth. An octopus reached up lazily with a tentacle, wiggled it at nothing, and settled back dark and quiet.

  Fish swam in and around the rusting, torn hulk of a submerged cargo ship, in and out of gaping holes and ripped ports. The legend on the prow said: USS Atlantic.

  It was quite soundless. The water formed around the ship like green gelatin.

  And then Conda came, with his recruits.

  They were swimming like dream-motes through the wide dark-watered valleys of the ocean; Conda at the head of the school with his red shock of hair flurried upright in a current, and his red bush beard trailed down over the massive ribs of his chest. He put out his great arms, clutched water, pulled back, and his long body shot ahead.

  The others imitated Conda, and it was very quietly done. The ripple of white arms, cupped hands, the glimmer of quick moving feet, was like the movement of motion pictures from which the sound-track has been cut. Just deep water silence and the mute moves of Conda and his swarm.

  Alita came close at his kicking heels. She swam with her sea-green eyes wide-fixed and dark hair spilling back over her naked body. Her mouth twisted with some sort of agony to which she could give no words.

  Alita felt something moving at her side. Another, smaller, woman, very thin in her nakedness, with gray hair and a shrivelled husk of face that held nothing but weariness. She swam too, and would keep on swimming.

  And then there was Helene, flashing by over their heads like an instantaneous charge of lightning. Helene with her hot angry eyes and her long platinum hair and her strange laughter.

  “How much longer, Conda?” The old woman’s thought reached through the waters, touching the brains of them all as they swam.

  “An hour. Perhaps only forty minutes!” came Conda’s blunt retort. It had the depth of fathoms in it; dark like the tides in the sunken water lands.

  “Watch out!” somebody cried.

  Down through the green waters overhead something tumbled. A shadow crossed the ocean surface, quick, like a gigantic sea-gull.

  “Depth-charge!” shouted Conda. “Get away from it!”

  Like so many frightened fish the twenty of them scattered instantly, with a flurry of legs, a spreading of arms, a diving of heads.

  The depth-charge ripped water into gouts and shreds, spread terrific vibrations down to kick the sandy bottom, up to ram the surface like a geyser!

  Alita screamed to herself as she sank, stunned, to the sea-floor, a queer strange pain going through her limbs. If only this were over, if only the real death came. If only it were over.

  A shivering went through her. Quite suddenly the water was icy cold, and she was alone in the green emptiness. So very alone. Alone, staring at a dark ring on her left hand.

  “Richard, I want to see you again so very much. Oh, Richard, if we could only be together.”

  “Daughter.” The gentle thought husked at her as the old woman glided up, white hair misting around her wrinkled face. “Don’t. Don’t think. Come along. There’s work. Work to be done. Much of it. Work for you and me and the ships on the surface, and for—for Richard.”

  Alita didn’t move. “I don’t want to swim. I’d rather just sit here on the sand and…wait.”

  “You know you can’t do that.”

  The old woman touched her. “You’d be all the unhappier. You have a reason to swim or you wouldn’t be swimming. Come along. We’re almost there!”

  The effects of the depth-charge, dropped from a low-flying airplane, had dispersed. Mud-streaks boiled up fogging the water, and there were a million air bubbles dancing toward the outer world like laughing diamonds. Alita let the old woman take her hand and tu
g her up from the sand floor. Together they progressed toward Conda, who was the nucleus of a growing congregation.

  “Submarine!” somebody thought, in a tense whisper. “Over that crop of coral ahead. That’s why the airplane dropped the depth-charge!”

  “What kind of submarine?” someone else asked.

  “German,” said Conda grimly. His red beard wavered in the water and the red-rimmed eyes stared out with iron fury. Helene flicked by them all, swiftly, laughing. “A German submarine lying on the bottom, sleeping quietly—waiting for the convoy!”

  Their minds swirled at the words of Conda, like so many warm-cold currents intermixing with fear and apprehension.

  “And the convoy will pass this spot in how long?”

  “Half an hour at most, now.”

  “Then there isn’t much time, is there?”

  “Not much.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous for us to be near it? What if the airplane returns with more depth-charges?”

  Conda growled. “This is the limit to the plane range. That plane won’t be back. He’s out of bombs and out of gas. It’s our job now. And what of it? You afraid?”

  Silence.

  * * * *

  The ring of faces looked to Conda for the plan. Alita among them; fourteen men, six women. Men with beards grown out for five months; hair long and unshorn about their ears. Pallid watery faces with determined bone under the skin, set jaws and tightened fists. All gathered like fragments of some oceanic nightmare. The pallid undead, breathing water, and thinking mute thoughts about the stormy night when the USS Atlantic had been torpedoed and sent to the bottom, with all of them trapped, screaming, inside her.

  “We never had our chance,” said Conda, grimly, “to get where we were going to do what we had to do. But we’ll go on doing it until the war’s over because that’s all that’s worth while doing. I don’t know how we live or what makes us live except the will to fight, the will to vengeance, wanting to win—not wanting to lie on the coral shelves like so much meat for the sharks—”