Collected Short Fiction, page 675
“That was off in another town. He slipped into Fairfax through the woods. Dressed in a floppy hat and an old rain cape to make like a human hobo, he was working the alleys, begging for food. I must have been playing gin at the country club that day. Anyhow, Billie Fran was home alone.”
Rage seethed in him.
“I guess she let him into the kitchen first. She filled him up with a roast and potatoes she’d been cooking for me. She never told me all they did, but finally she put him in the little apartment behind the garage, where her old lady stayed till she died. She kept him there—if you can picture that!
“How could she do it?” He blinked at me, his glaring fury clouded with a dim bewilderment. “A sweet girl like Billy Fran—singing in the Presbyterian choir and teaching the toddler’s Sunday school class and crying like a baby every time she found a spot of lipstick on my shirt. How could any woman love that circus freak? When she had me?”
I didn’t try to answer.
“She kept him there the best part of a year before I ever knew. But she wasn’t the only one he had.” A sullen amazement slowed his voice. “I guess it was the cleaning woman, first. Then her Thursday bridge luncheon. Then her Sunday school class—the young married women.” He grimaced with a certain bitter smugness. “So I wasn’t the only sucker.”
I couldn’t help asking how he found the moon child.
“Billie was just too damned happy.” He scowled savagely. “Too damned healthy. Too damned beautiful. Like she had discovered the fountain of life. Her sinusitis cleared up. She was singing to herself all the time. Doing little things to please me. She tried to cook what I liked and she saved out of the house allowance to buy a new shockproof chronoscope I wanted for my birthday. And she quit nagging when I come in late. Things like that made me wonder, but then a stranger tipped me off.
“A fat black little guy with a hook nose and a bad odor. When he first come out to the Poppy-Cola plant I thought he was a federal nark. But it turns out he don’t care how we spike the stuff. He’s a private eye, hired to find the moon jewel.”
“Huh?” I had begun to wonder how my missing brother would fit into the picture. “Was his name Tom Hood?”
THE name he gave us was Todhunter Hoke.” Ballou peered at me sharply. “He knew all about that educated Siberian bear and he’d talked to that bunged-up college professor. He snooped around till he located that moon beast and his harem.
“I saw red when he told me about Billie Fran. I tried to hit him, but he ducked away and tossed me a picture of her and the beast. He’d bugged the room, too, and he played me a tape that made me sick. That beast and Billie Fran making love and laughing at me!”
Ballou sat silent for a moment, his scarred face dark and twitching.
“Hoke called a bunch of us together. My golf and poker buddies—that hairy brute had all our wives.” His stifled voice was hoarse with hate. “I wanted to catch him and burn him alive, but Hoke said he’d be too hard for us to handle.
“So finally we called in the law. My uncle was the chief of police and the county sheriff had a note at the bank, so we got cooperation. We closed in on that garage apartment with twenty men in six cars. I had buckshot in a pump gun and I meant to gut-shoot the beast. But he got away.” Ballou writhed with frustration. “Somebody yelled that he was running into the woods behind the barbecue. We all dashed in like fools. Shooting started down in the brush by the creek, but when we got to the dead man he was just a deputy sheriff.
“That beast had out-foxed us—them damfool women musta tipped him off. Our cars had been rolled over and set on fire before we got outa the woods. And all that was just for openers—”
Perhaps I had smiled, because he stopped to glare at me.
“It ain’t no joke,” he whined angrily. “Not to none of us. Nor to them women, when our turn comes. We’ll make them sluts hate the day they ever saw that stinkin’ brute.”
“It’s more than a joke,” I agreed. “Did you ever catch the moon man?”
“Not yet. Nor many of his crazy bitches, either. The sheriff tried to round up all the women and get ’em out of town. He swore us into a special posse and sent us up and down the streets, but all we caught was a handful of little girls and smooth-mouthed grannies. All the rest was hiding or shooting at us.
“That hunt went on all day. A dozen men was hurt or killed in a shootout at the city park. The sheriff got hit in an ambush down by the bottling plant. A big fire was set on Main Street while we were outa town.
“We had ’em surrounded once in the Red Raven tavern, out on the airport road. The police tossed riot bombs into the place and went in shooting. But that brute was too much for ’em. He breathed the gas and took the bullets and used the chief like a club to smash his way out. A hairy devil! Big as a Brahma bull.
“And them women—you can’t imagine what he’s done to them! Most of ’em pregnant. Blown up with their own baby beasts. But that don’t slow ’em down. I seen the Presbyterian pastor thrown outa the tavern through a plate glass window by his own young daughter.
“By night they was hunting us. Gangs of them hot bitches took the court house and the city hall and the militia armory. They sniped at us from the water tower and the elevators and the roof of my old man’s bank. They run us out of town.”
Ballou lay back and closed his eyes, wheezing for his breath as if defeated all over again by the violence of his own narrative.
“Run us out—and kept us out. They burned the bridges. Piled up wrecked cars for road blocks. Posted snipers in trees and silos. Them crazy women and their hairy stud—that’s why we call him the Moon King.”
“So he’s still there?”
“The gov’ment ain’t about to help us catch him—not when they’re busy losing the space war. The militia’s been trying to fight a patch of killer fog spreading over Lake Ballou. So Hoke helped us organize our own mounted patrol.
“I’m the captain, of course. We forded the river early one morning and slipped down through the woods where the snipers couldn’t spot us. We surprised three women picking beans in a little garden patch. They yelled and ran, but we caught one of ’em.
“Billie Fran—about to bust with her own monster-baby. Her second kid by him—she never wanted none of mine. We took her back to camp. She wouldn’t talk at first, but she opened up when Hoke got hold of her. She told us all about that brute and the moon jewel—how they keep it in the bank vault while he sleeps once a week, two or three days at a time.
“I felt sorry for her when Hoke got through—what a fool I was!” Ballou’s quivering fingertips explored his scar. “I was guarding her that night, in the barn where we was camped. Somehow she got untied and come at me with a rusty old gelding knife she musta found under the hay. She cut me up and got away on our best horse.
“That’s how come me here—and I like to died on the road. But we ain’t through. Hoke’s setting up another raid right now, but he’ll wait for me to lead it. He’s overhauling a broke-down army tank the militia left when they run away from the lake. We’re going in with that on a day when the Moon King’s asleep. I don’t think them bitches know how to stop a tank—”
“Nap time, Mr. Ballou!”
He glowered at the bustling nurse as if she had been one of Guy’s girls. Smiling sweetly, she smoothed his sheets and read his monitors and spread his tent for another heal-sleep treatment.
Three of his commandoes came to pick him up when he was discharged. They were brown sullen men, bristling with knives and guns. The tank had been checked out, one of them said, and Hoke was figuring the days when the Moon King would be asleep. If the hairy bastard ever woke up, he’d learn he’d lost his marbles.
TO BE CONCLUDED
The Moon Children
CONCLUSION
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
The Moon Children were born to the wives of three lunar explorers who had become mysteriously contaminated during an unscheduled moon landing in response to a light phenomenon.
NICK and KYRIE were born days apart, mentally precocious and aware of each other before they met—and of GUY before he was born some months later. Earth had had experience of the dangers of contact with alien biocosms—particularly those of Jupiter and Mercury—and the children were hated and feared. KYRIE and GUY were rejected even by their parents and all three were brought up under laboratory conditions under the aegis of COSMOS, an official body. Their immediate supervision was in the hands of Nick’s parents, YURI MARKO and Dr. CAROLINA CARTER.
By the age of seven NICK and KYRIE were matching wits with Earth’s lop scientists. NICK solved the mystery of the propulsion system used by Jovian delta-life—and traded his knowledge for some of the moon grit that had contaminated his father. The grit held an instant message for the children. It told them they were not children at all—and not human.
From the moon grit, fashioned by GUY into a mysteriously energized tetrahedron, NICK and KYRIE learn their real mission. They are to build a gigantic tachyon tower to guide in the FTL ships of an advanced interstellar culture capable of solving Earth’s growing problems with alien biocosms. Construction of the tower, however, would tax Earth’s global resources. So world governments vote instead to dismantle COSMOS and cope individually with the problems of the invading biocosms.
Skygate, formerly site of COSMOS, becomes a U.S. military installation. NICK and KYRIE continue their study of the tetrahedron, but their problems are compounded by the fact that GUY, growing increasingly animal-like, becomes jealous of them. The new world situation also forces the return of GUY’S father, TOM HODIAN, from self-imposed exile. GUY becomes pathetically attached to his father and further estranged from KYRIE and NICK.
With Earth now virtually in a state of siege by the alien biocosms, a new menace appears. Metal ants, energy-consuming and impervious to attack, overrun Skygate. Suspected of collaboration with the alien menace, KIM HODIAN, the chronicler of these events, is being flown into custody when his plane is downed in an
apparent attack by Jovian delta-life.
He comes to in a hospital. While he recovers, Earth is slowly losing the battle of the biocosms. But he hears rumors leading him to believe that GUY has escaped Skygate with the priceless tetrahedron—and is being worshiped as a sex-symbol by women.
MY NEXT companion was Dr. Narasimachar. The gamma-forms were eating his nerve tissue now. Most of the time he was twisting and moaning in an agony the nurses couldn’t relieve, or howling in delirium, but sometimes he was sane and calm enough to talk.
“You know, Hodian, I hate to go now,” he told me during one long midnight interlude. “Just before the world ends. I’d rather be the last man. Anyhow, I’d like to live long enough to see where we went wrong.”
Drowsily, I pondered that.
“I was a research man,” he said. “I never cared much for individual people—you learned not to in the Indian cities where I grew up. But I did have rather large ideals. That’s why I tackled the space diseases. We had to conquer them, I thought, before we could hope to make friends with our neighbor biocosms. Now I guess we’ll never win.”
He sighed and fell silent. I lay contemplating Spike Ballou and his tale of Guy’s kingdom of women, who were somehow protected by the moon jewel from both space creatures and space diseases. The whole story seemed too complex and improbable to bear retelling to a dying man, so I said nothing.
“I’ve always been an optimist,” Narasimachar went on suddenly. “I believed in science. I hoped it would show us our world and our nature. I tried to make it a bridge that we could follow, from the animals we are to the gods we could be.”
I heard him move and felt his tormented eyes on me in the dark.
“Hodian, do you think I was wrong?”
I had to say I didn’t know.
By morning he was frothing and whimpering again. Two days later he died. Andy Elving came in to pull the sheets over his face and draw the screen around his bed, but nobody took him away. Sometimes I heard feet and thumps and whispers in the corridor, but nobody answered my buzzer.
The screen blocked my view of the window, but for a time I could hear sounds in the street. The drum of fast traffic. An angry blare of horns. Now and again, squealing tires and the crash of a collision. These noises ebbed and finally ceased.
By afternoon the silence was stifling. I strained to hear the clink of a dish, the echo of a footstep, a voice on the street, for any sound at all. All I could hear, with my head on the pillow, was the slow throb of my own blood.
Before nightfall, Narasimachar had begun to smell. Not, however, with any odor of human decay, but with the sour and overpowering scent of the gamma-life which had consumed him, a scent like a mashed beetle.
Goaded by that odor, by hot thirst and cold terror, I struggled out of bed that night. Giddy with weakness, clutching at chairs and the wall, I swayed around that blocking screen and reached the window.
Outside, a full moon shone on a sea of snowy fog. It lay flat across the river valley and covered most of the town. Here, on the low hill where the hospital stood, the tops of trees and the roofs of a few drowned houses stood dark above it. Covering the first floor of the hospital, the fog came nearly to my window ledge.
Far away across it, faint lights twinkled on the black hills where I suppose the refugees were camped. Though no wind stirred the trees, that vast white lake was alive with lazy waves whose slow rise and fall became almost hypnotic. Cold as the moon, serenely soundless, it shone with an unearthly loveliness that almost invited me to jump.
FATALITY
XVIII
ANDY ELVING woke me next morning out of a long nightmare in which a sweet high voice like the baby Kyrie’s kept enticing me to dive into that snowy fog. I found myself where I must have fallen inside the window. Along with all the familiar discomforts of my gamma-form infection, I was bruised and chilled, too numb to move.
Elving wore a mask against the overwhelming beetle reek of Dr. Narasimachar’s corpse. Pale and grim beneath it, he made no effort to speak, but moved with methodic calm, hauling me into a wheelchair and pushing me down the empty corridors and ramps out to the hospital parking lot. It was deserted except for an abandoned funeral coach that must have come for the dead doctor.
My stiffened limbs jerked with shock when I met the fog. Its odor struck me first—a heavy rancid scent that made me think of overripe muskmelons rotting in a garbage can. Then I saw it through a screen of trees—a gray uneven sea that heaved and billowed as if agitated by more wind than I could feel.
Its surface layers, darkened to a leaden color, were shredded into tattered, crawling wisps, as if somehow dissolved by sunlight. Its level had sunk perhaps a dozen yards, leaving the hospital on a low island rimmed with a red, slick-looking residue where its deeper layers had lain.
Beneath those writhing tongues its depths were still milk-white, opaque as ever. Lapping over the roofs below the row of trees, the dull flood filled the valley and still covered most of the city. A forlorn little group of buildings in the business district rose out of it, the tallest topped with a sign somehow still flashing: PITMAN TRUST.
“A bad night, Mr. Kim.” Elving had torn off his white mask when we came into the open. “Sorry I couldn’t get you out yesterday, but I was trying to save a few of my roses.” He was loading me out of the wheelchair into the long black hearse and I saw a stack of his rose bushes already there, neatly bagged in burlap. “The militia had warned us, but the fog came in faster than anybody thought. I spent the night on the hospital roof.”
I felt a pang of dismay when I learned that the motor keys were missing, but Andy Elving had been an astro-engineer. He lifted the hood and started the motor with a pair of pliers. I watched with a little more hope as he got under the wheel and drove us off the parking lot.
The fog surrounded us. He tried one street and then another, turning back when the pavement dipped below that restless sea. Everything was covered on three sides of us. Southward, however, the ground was higher. At last we found one residential street where dripping trees and soiled roofs marked out a hazardous lane through the fogginess.
Elving stopped the hearse above that street to study the crawling tongues of mist that still intermittently hid the red-slimed pavement. Stolidly calm, he pulled a plug of tobacco out of his hip pocket and bit off the end of it.
“A filthy habit,” he muttered absently. “Picked it up on the moon. We couldn’t smoke in the spacecraft.”
He sat there some thirty minutes, chewing steadily, spitting unobtrusively, watching those tossing rags of fog. At last he expelled his wad into the street, closed the window, gripped the wheel.
“Hang on, Mr. Kim,” he called to me. “The stuff has gone down as far as it’s going to. I guess it’s now or never for us.”
Too weak to hang on, I dropped flat. The trucklike hearse lurched down the street. Gray tongues licked at the windows. Suddenly everything was white. Elving sat hunched and rigid, driving blind.
We hit something. The hearse lurched and quivered with the impact. Above the whine of the racing motor I thought I heard another sound—a thin fading wail, like the cry of some small creature in pain.
Perhaps the echo simply lurked in my excited imagination, for the hearse was skidding, the tires screeching on the unseen pavement with a far louder scream. Elving grunted and struggled at the wheel. We jolted against the hidden curb, and that rancid musk-melon odor was suddenly nauseating. But the hearse roared on till I saw blue sky.
Elving stopped a mile up the street. He rolled down the window, mopped his calm brown face and bit off more tobacco.
“Well, Mr. Kim.” He looked around at me almost casually. “What now?”
“I think I know a place where the fog and the ants won’t come. A place where nobody gets the space diseases.”
I told him briefly about Spike Ballou and the Moon King.
