Complete Short Fiction, page 96
Hadn’t when he came right down to it remotely grasped that his death had been inevitable from the beginning.
As soon as they discovered that the doors of the spaceship would open at nine in the morning, and that Greer could offer no resistance, why, they would dispense with intermediaries.
His one advantage, so vital that it hurt even to think about it, was about to be stripped from him by a machine that needed only the proper questions to elicit the correct answers; and accordingly he had once chance—one slim chance:
He must agree to the main points. And mean it so that the machine would believe him. Believe him beyond all possibility of the registering needles being tremulous and uncertain. Therefore—
Neelan’s eyes narrowed to slits. He must be prepared to kill Greer, if necessary. The problem of what he would eventually do with the man had been a dim question far back in his mind. But now there was no alternative. Greer must die.
He saw that the instrument was being separated, divided into two parts. The focusing section stood on the tea table, its cone-shaped, radiant muzzle pointing at him. The empress held the receiver, with its bank of registering needles, on her lap.
She looked up, her lips parted for speech; and there was no doubt at all that the time had come. He lived or died according to his ability to control the next few minutes.
“Your majesty, may I speak?”
She gave him a quick look. Puzzlement was in that glance, and a swift suspicion. The grim thought came to Neelan that he was dealing with one of the sharpest, most agile minds in the Isher Empire.
The woman nodded finally, stiffly. “Very well.”
As he began, he saw her gaze flick down to the needles. He had the sudden sensation that he was walking a tightrope with closed eyes, but there could be no hesitation:
“Naturally, I’ve been thinking over your commands. As you say, I have killed men before, and undoubtedly I can do it again. I don’t like to shoot even an animal without giving it a chance but—”
He paused there, riffling over the words in his mind to see if so much as a single one of them didn’t fit both his situation and theirs. They all did. Neelan went on:
“I’m not sure exactly all you want to know, but I swear that I learned of the job With Greer through the Public Ad Service. And I would like to say that, circumstances being what they are, I am prepared to kill Greer. I shall kill him with the revolver you gave me. There, is that what you want?”
It was of course, basically. He watched her, trying not to make it a glare of anxiety. To his relief he saw that she was not looking at him, but the needles. The empress said abruptly, sharply:
“Zeydel, come over here, and watch.”
To Neelan, she said even more sharply: “Repeat that about killing Greer.”
Neelan complied, silently cursing the efficiency of the machine that must be registering at least fractionally the crosscurrents in his thought. It was Zeydel who broke the silence, respectfully:
“He means it, high majesty, but it’s not clear. I would suggest that he is a man who will have to nerve himself to killing coldbloodedly, and he won’t do that until the time approaches.”
The empress shook her head, impatiently dismissing that solution. There was more color in her cheeks. She stood up, began to pace the floor, her long skirt rustling. Several minutes passed, and then she faced Neelan. Her eyes were icy regions; her voice was an edged weapon that jabbed at him:
“Why did you volunteer that information, rather than wait for my question? You’re hiding something, aren’t you?”
She grabbed at the Lambeth receiver with feline eagerness. “Answer me that question,” she said avidly. “Are you hiding something?”
Neelan sighed. He felt old and tired. Here was the dead end to all his hopes; and only courage remained. Courage and the knowledge of what defeat would mean.
“I refuse,” he said slowly, weightily, “to answer that question.”
He added after a moment: “Or any other question.”
There was a hush that filled the room, an incredulous pause, heavy with suppressed shock. The climax, Neelan realized bleakly, had come upon them too suddenly. Their minds wouldn’t adjust. The men looked at each other. The woman stood stone-still, her head bent forward, and her face had not a semblance of the smile that had graced it before. She said at last, almost sighing the words:
“You realize what you are doing? You are pitting yourself against the Crown, your lawful government.”
Neelan tried to picture that as she meant it; and it was an unnerving picture. The Isher emperors and empresses had, to a vast extent, the affection of their subjects. Even those who opposed them recognized how great a family it was; even the Weapon Shops had never tried to overthrow them.
Neelan steadied himself. “I would like to point out that I have agreed to do what you ask. What I am hiding is a personal matter. It—”
He was cut off by a tinkle of laughter. He stared, startled by the sound, and by the look on the empress’ face. The woman’s laughter continued, musical but strangely unpleasant. It ended finally on an unnatural note.
“If it’s a crime,” she said, “however horrible, I absolve you from it. I pardon you. Do you hear that? No matter what it is, no court will ever try you for it. But I must know. Tell me.”
Almost, she didn’t look human. Her eyes flamed. Her face was a white mask of intensity. She stood straight and tall. Neelan said:
“I have agreed—”
She cut him off in astounded rage: “Are others involved? Then they, too, are guiltless. No court shall touch them. No investigation shall be made. If one is under way, it will be dropped. I pardon them. I forgive them everything, any crime, murder, lust, robbery, treason—anything.”
There was nothing to say. Neelan sat in his chair, stiff, conscious of the woman pacing up and down in front of him, and that in her eyes was a stark disbelief.
“I’ll give you,” her voice burned, “a hundred million credits. Do you understand? More money than you can ever spend or gamble away. It will be deposited to your account in any bank this minute. Simply yield yourself to all questions, and everything that you can ever ask for from this world will be yours.”
It was her utter desperation that did it. The tight, terrible feeling inside Neelan began to ease. He had never expected anything like this: The Empress of Isher acting like a mad woman.
She needed him. That was the reality behind her bloodthirsty threats, her wild offers. She couldn’t get her men into the spaceship while Greer was there. Or rather—while her fevered brain imagined Greer was there, and in a position to launch the great ship into space.
“You mean, you won’t do it?”
Her voice was a whisper. She swayed as if she was about to faint. Her eyes were wide. For a moment, she looked ill unto death.
“Your majesty—” It was Zeydel, anxious-toned.
“Silence!” Her voice was a whipsnap of sound. She waved at Zeydel, as if she was striking him.
She came forward, close to Neelan, peering down at him where he sat as at some incomprehensible monster. Her voice, that remarkable, flexible voice, was suddenly almost caressing:
“You don’t look insane. You look normal, a handsome young man. You can have no reason to want to die.”
“Your majesty,” Neelan said, “surely the fact that I have agreed—”
He must keep pressing that; it was the great hook that kept him hanging on this side of the death line. Desiring so much, she must accept the less, if more was not to be had.
She seemed not to have heard. Her voice, still soft, gentle, cut across his: “There are ways of making people talk.”
That was chilling. The very quietness made the threat the more deadly. Neelan said:
“No drug will work on my definitely opposed will. I have the three advanced mind trainings, for memory, for control, for—”
“I was not thinking,” the empress said caressingly, “of drugs.”
She whirled. “Zeydel!” Her voice pierced the great silence of the room. “Zeydel, bring on the sensory vibrator.”
She caught herself, and turned slowly back to Neelan. Her face was as pale as snow, her eyes looked old and bleached green.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Neelan,” she said quietly. “You may not believe this, but I have never before had a man or woman physically tortured. Killed, yes; but not tortured. And yet I must overcome this fantastic refusal of yours. Won’t you please be reasonable?”
Her appeal seemed without meaning. He felt remote, cold, and there was an awful sardonicism in him, that grew and grew to monstrous proportions until, finally, looking at her, he said:
“Your first torture, is it?” He laughed, and knew from the naturalness of that laugh that he was no longer quite sane. He finished coolly: “I am sure your majesty will survive the experience.”
Her manner froze visibly. “Yes,” she said at last through clenched teeth, “yes, I will survive.”
TO BE CONTINUED.
THE WITCH
She was old, old and afraid of the Sea and the Night. For the ancient witch-thing she was had reason to fear those things that the young people could not understand. They were wrong in that—and in not fearing her.
From where he sat, half hidden by the scraggly line of bushes, Marson watched the old woman. It was minutes now since he had stopped reading. The afternoon air hung breathless around him. Even here, a cliff’s depth away from the sparkling tongue of sea that curled among the rocks below, the heat was a material thing, crushing at his strength.
But it was the letter in his pocket, not the blazing sunlight, that weighed on Marson’s mind. Two days now since that startling letter had arrived; and he still hadn’t the beginning of the courage necessary to ask for an explanation.
Frowning uncertainly—unsuspected—unsuspecting—he watched.
The old woman basked in the sun. Her long, thin, pale head drooped in sleep. On and on she sat, moveless, an almost shapeless form in her black sack of a dress.
The strain of looking hurt his eyes; his gaze wandered; embraced the long, low, tree-protected cottage with its neat, white garage and its aloneness there on that high, green hill overlooking the great spread of city. Marson had a brief, cozy sense of privacy—then he turned back to the old woman.
For a long moment, he stared unshaken at the spot where she had been. He was conscious of a dim, intellectual surprise, but there was not a real thought in his head. After a brief period, he grew aware of the blank, and he thought:
Thirty feet to the front door from where she had been sitting; and she would have had to cross his line of vision to get there.
An old woman, perhaps ninety, perhaps a hundred or more, an incredibly old woman, capable of moving—well thirty feet a minute.
Marson stood up. There was a searing pain where an edge of the sun had cut into his shoulders. But that passed. From his upright position, he saw that not a solitary figure was visible on the steeply mounting sidewalk. And only the sound of the sea on the rocks below broke the silence of that hot Saturday afternoon.
Where had the old wretch disappeared to?
The front door opened; and Joanna came out. She called to him:
“Oh, there you are, Craig. Mother Quigley was just asking where you were.”
Marson came silently down from the cliff’s edge. Almost meticulously, he took his wife’s words, figuratively rolled them over in his mind, and found them utterly inadequate. The old woman couldn’t have been just asking for him, because the old woman had NOT gone through that door and therefore hadn’t asked anyone anything for the last twenty minutes.
At last an idea came. He said: “Where’s Mother Quigley now?”
“Inside.” He saw that Joanna was intent on the flower box of the window beside the door. “She’s been knitting in the living room for the last half hour.”
Amazement in him yielded to sharp annoyance. There was too damn much old woman in his mind since that letter had come less than forty-eight hours before. He drew it out, and stared bleakly at the scrawl of his name on the envelope.
It was simple enough, really, that this incredible letter had come to him. After the old woman’s arrival nearly a year before, an unexpected nightmare, he had mentally explored all the possible reverberations that might accrue from her presence in his home. And the thought had come that, if she had left any debts in the small village where she had lived, he’d better pay them.
A young man, whose appointment to the technical school principalship had been severely criticized on the grounds of his youth, couldn’t afford to have anything come back on him. And so a month before he had leisurely written the letter to which this was the answer.
Slowly, he drew the note from its envelope and once more reread the mind-staggering words in it:
Dear Mr. Marson:
As I am the only debtor, the postmaster handed me your letter; and I wish to state that, when your great grandmother died last year, I buried her myself and in my capacity as gravestone maker, I carved a stone for her grave. I did this at my own expense, being a God-fearing man, but if there is a relative, I feel you should bear cost of same, which is eighteen (18) dollars. I hope to hear from you, as I need the money just now. Pete Cole.
Marson stood for a long moment; then he turned to speak to Joanna—just in time to see her disappearing into the house. Once more undecided, he climbed to the cliff’s edge, thinking:
The old scoundrel! The nerve of a perfect stranger of an old woman walking into a private home and pulling a deception like that.
His public situation being what it was, his only solution was to pay her way into an institution; and even that would require careful thought—
Frowning blackly, he hunched himself deeper into his chair there on the cliff’s edge, and deliberately buried himself in his book. It was not until much later that memory came of the way the old woman had disappeared from the lawn. Funny, he thought then, it really was damned funny.
The memory faded—
Blankly sat the old woman.
Supper was over; and, because for years there had been no reserves of strength in that ancient body, digestion was an almost incredible process, an all-out affair.
She sat as one dead, without visible body movement, without thought in her brain; even the grim creature purpose that had brought her here to this house lay like a stone at the bottom of the black pool that was her mind.
It was-as if she had always sat there in that chair by the window overlooking the sea, like an inanimate object, like some horrible mummy, like a wheel that, having settled into position, seemed now immovable.
After an hour, awareness began to creep into her bones. The creature mind of her, the strange, inhuman creature mind behind the parchmentlike, sharp-nosed mask of human flesh, stirred into life.
It studied Marson at the living room table, his head bent thoughtfully over the next term curriculum he was preparing. Toothless lips curled finally into a contemptuous sneer.
The sneer faded, as Joanna slipped softly into the room. Half-closed, fetching eyes peered then, with an abruptly ravenous, beastlike lust at the slim, lithe, strong body. Pretty, pretty body, soon now to be taken over.
In the three-day period of the first new moon after the summer solstice . . . in nine days exactly—
Nine days! The ancient carcass shuddered and wriggled ecstatically with the glee of the creature. Nine short days, and once again the age-long cycle of dynamic existence would begin. Such a pretty young body, too, capable of vibrant, world-ranging life—
Thought faded, as Joanna went back into the kitchen. Slowly, for the first time, awareness came of the sea.
Contentedly sat the old woman. Soon now, the sea would hold no terrors, and the blinds wouldn’t have to be down, nor the windows shut; she would even be able to walk along the shore at midnight as of old; and they, whom she had deserted so long ago, would once more shrink from the irresistible energy aura of her new, young body.
The sound of the sea came to her, where she sat so quietly; calm sound at first, almost gentle in the soft sibilation of each wave thrust. Farther out, the voices of the water were louder, more raucous, blatantly confident, but the meaning of what they said was blurred by the distance, a dim, clamorous confusion that rustled discordantly out of the gathering night.
Night!
She shouldn’t be aware of night falling, when the blinds were drawn.
With a little gasp, she twisted toward the window beside which she sat. Instantly, a blare of hideous fear exploded from her lips.
The ugly sound bellowed into Marson’s ears, and brought him lurching to his feet. It raged through the door into the kitchen, and Joanna came running as if it was a rope pulling at her.
The old woman screeched on; and it was Marson who finally penetrated to the desire behind that mad terror.
“Good Lord!” he shrugged. “It’s the windows and the blinds. I forgot to put them down when dusk fell.”
He stopped, irritated, then: “Damned nonsense! I’ve a good mind to—”
“For Heaven’s sake!” his wife urged. “We’ve got to stop that noise. I’ll take this side of the room; you take the windows next to her.”
Marson shrugged again, acquiescently. But he was thinking: They wouldn’t have this to put up with much longer. As soon as the summer holidays arrived, he’d make arrangements to put her in the Old Folks Home. And that would be that. Less than two weeks now.
His wife’s voice broke almost sharply across the silence that came, as Mother Quigley settled back into her chair: “I’m surprised at you forgetting a thing like that. You’re usually so thoughtful.”
“It was so damned hot!” Marson complained.
Joanna said no more; and he went back to his chair. But he was thinking suddenly: Old woman who fears the sea and the night, why did you come to this house by the sea, where the street lamps are far apart and the nights are almost primevally dark?
