Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (175 page)

“Yes,” said the girl quickly. “I shall—need no—food for—a while.”

“Well —” Smith glanced around the room. “I’ll be in sometime tonight. You can go or stay just as you please. Better lock the door behind me.”

With no more formality than that, he left her. The door closed, and he heard the key turn and smiled to himself. He did not expect, then, ever to see her again.

He went down the steps and out into the late-slanting sunlight with a mind so full of other matters that the brown girl receded very quickly into the background.

* * * *

Smith’s errand in Lakkdarol, like most of his errands, is better not spoken of. Man lives as he must, and Smith’s living was a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by the ray-gun only. It is enough to say that the shipping-port and its cargoes outbound interested him deeply just now, and that the friend he awaited was Yarol the Venusian, in that swift little Edsel ship the
Maid
that can flash from world to world with a derisive speed that laughs at Patrol boats and leaves pursuers floundering in the ether far behind. Smith and Yarol and the
Maid
were a trinity that had caused the Patrol leaders much worry and many gray hairs in the past, and the future looked very bright to Smith himself that evening as he left his lodging-house.

Lakkdarol roars by night, as Earthmen’s camp-towns have a way of doing on every planet where Earth’s outposts are, and it was beginning lustily as Smith went down among the awakening lights toward the center of town. His business there does not concern us. He mingled with the crowds where the lights were brightest, and there was the click of ivory counters and the jingle of silver, and red segir gurgled invitingly from black Venusian bottles, and much later Smith strolled homeward under the moving moons of Mars, and if the street wavered a little under his feet now and then—why, that is only understandable. Not even Smith could drink red segir at every bar from the Martian Lamb to the New Chicago and remain en tirely steady on his feet. But he found his way back with very little difficulty—considering—and spent a good five minutes hunting for his key before he remembered he had left it in the inner lock for the girl.

He knocked then, and there was no sound of footsteps from within, but in a few moments the latch clicked and the door swung open. She retreated soundlessly before him as he entered, and she took up her favorite place against the window, leaning back on the sill and outlined against the starry sky beyond. The room was in darkness.

Smith flipped the switch by the door and then leaned back against the panels, steadying himself. The cool night air had sobered him a little, and his head was clear enough—liquor went to Smith’s feet, not his head, or he would never have come this far along the lawless way he had chosen. He lounged against the door now and regarded the girl in the sudden glare of the bulbs, blinking a little as much at the scarlet of her clothing as at the light.

“So you stayed,” he said.

“I—waited,” she answered softly, leaning farther back against the sill and clasping the rough wood with slim, three-fingered hands, pale brown against the dark ness.

“Why?”

She did not answer that, but her mouth curved into a slow smile. On a woman it would have been reply enough—provocative, daring. On Shambleau there was something pitiful and horrible in it—so human on the face of one who was half animal. And yet…that sweet brown body curving so softly from the tatters of scarlet leather—the velvety texture of that brownness—the white-flashing smile.…Smith was aware of a stirring excitement within him. After all—time would be hanging heavy now until Yarol came.…Speculatively, he allowed the steel-pale eyes to wander over her with a slow regard that missed nothing. And when he spoke, he was aware that his voice had deepened a little.

“Come here,” he said.

She came forward slowly, on bare clawed feet that made not the slightest sound on the floor, and stood before him with eyes downcast and mouth trembling in that pitifully human smile. He took her by the shoulders—velvety soft shoulders, of a creamy smoothness that was not the texture of human flesh. A little tremor went over her, perceptibly, at the contact of his hands. Northwest Smith caught his breath suddenly and dragged her to him…sweet yielding brownness in the circle of his arms…heard her own breath catch and quicken as her velvety arms closed about his neck. And then he was looking down into her face, very near, and the green animal eyes with the pulsing pupils met his, and the flicker of—something—deep behind their shallows—and through the rising clamor of his blood, even as he stooped his lips to hers, Smith felt something deep within him shudder away—inexplicable, instinctive, revolted. What it might be he had no words to tell, but the very touch of her was suddenly loathsome—so soft and velvet and unhuman—and it might have been an animal’s face that lifted itself to his mouth—the dark knowledge looked hungrily from the darkness of those slit pupils—and for a mad instant he knew that same wild, feverish revulsion he had seen in the faces of the mob.

“God!” he gasped, a far more ancient invocation against evil than he realized, then or ever, and he ripped her arms from his neck, swung her away with such a force that she reeled half across the room. Smith fell back against the door, breathing heavily, and stared at her while the wild revolt died slowly within him.

She had fallen to the floor beneath the window, and as she lay there against the wall with bent head he saw, curiously, that her turban had slipped—the turban that he had been so sure covered baldness—and a lock of scarlet hair fell below the binding leather, hair as scarlet as her garment, as unhumanly red as her eyes were unhumanly green. He stared, and shook his head dizzily and stared again, for it seemed to him that the thick lock of crimson had moved, squirmed of itself against her cheek.

At the contact of it, her hands flew up, and she tucked it away with a very human gesture and then dropped her head again into her hands. And, from the deep shadow of her fingers, he thought she was staring up at him covertly.

Smith drew a deep breath and passed a hand across his forehead. The inexplicable moment had gone as quickly as it came—too swiftly for him to understand or analyze it.

“— Got to lay off the segir,” he told himself un steadily.

Had he imagined that scarlet hair? After all, she was no more than a pretty brown girl-creature from one of the many half human races peopling the planets. No more than that, after all. A pretty little thing, but animal? He laughed a little shakily.

“No more of that,” he said. “God knows I’m no angel, but there’s got to be a limit somewhere. Here.” He crossed to the bed and sorted out a pair of blankets from the untidy heap, tossing them to the far corner of the room. “You can sleep there.”

Wordlessly, she rose from the floor and began to rearrange the blankets, the uncomprehending resignation of the animal eloquent in every line of her.

* * * *

Smith had a strange dream that night. He thought he had awakened to a room full of darkness and moonlight and moving shadows, for the nearer moon of Mars was racing through the sky and everything on the planet below her was endued with a restless life in the dark. And something…some nameless, unthinkable thing…was coiled about his throat…something like a soft snake, wet and warm. It lay loose and light about his neck…and it was moving gently, very gently, with a soft, caressing pressure that sent little thrills of delight through every nerve and fiber of him, a perilous delight beyond physical pleasure, deeper than joy of the mind. That warm softness was caressing the very roots of his soul with a terrible intimacy. The ecstasy of it left him weak, and yet he knew—in a flash of knowledge born of this impossible dream—that the soul should not be handled.…And with that knowledge a horror broke upon him, turning the pleasure into a rapture of revulsion, hateful, horrible—but still most foully sweet. He tried to lift his hands and tear the dream-monstrosity from his throat—tried, but half heartedly, for though his soul was revolted to its very deeps, yet the delight of his body was so great that his hands all but refused the attempt. But when at last he tried to lift his arms, a cold shock went over him, and he found that he could not stir…his body lay stony as marble beneath the blankets, a living marble that shuddered with a dreadful delight through every rigid vein.

The revulsion grew strong upon him as he struggled against the paralyzing dream—a struggle of soul against sluggish body—titanically, until the moving dark was streaked with blankness that clouded and closed about him at last and he sank back into the oblivion from which he had awakened.

* * * *

Next morning, when the bright sunlight shining through Mars’ clear, thin air awakened him, Smith lay for a while trying to remember. The dream had been more vivid than reality, but he could not quite recall it…only that it had been more sweet and horrible than anything else in life. He lay puzzling for a while, until a soft sound from the corner aroused him from his thoughts, and he sat up to see the girl lying in a catlike coil on her blankets, watching him with round, grave eyes. He regarded her somewhat ruefully.

“Morning,” he said “I’ve just had the devil of a dream. Well, hungry?”

She shook her head silently, and he could have sworn there was a covert gleam of strange amusement in her eyes. He stretched and yawned, dismissing the nightmare temporarily from his mind.

“What am I going to do with you?” he inquired, turning to more immediate matters. “I’m leaving here in a day or two, and I can’t take you along, you know. Where’d you come from in the first place?”

Again she shook her head.

“Not telling? Well, it’s your own business. You can stay here until I give up the room. From then on, you’ll have to do your own worrying.”

He swung his feet to the floor and reached for his clothes.

* * * *

Ten minutes later, slipping the heat-gun into its holster at his thigh. Smith turned to the girl.

“There’s food-concentrate in that box on the table. It ought to hold you until I get back. And you’d better lock the door again after I’ve gone.”

Her wide, unwavering stare was his only answer. He was not sure she had understood, but at any rate the lock clicked after him as before, and he went down the steps with a faint grin on his lips.

The memory of last night’s extraordinary dream was slipping from him, as such memories do, and by the time he had reached the street, the girl and the dream and all of yesterday’s happenings were blotted out by the sharp necessities of the present.

Again, the intricate business that had brought him here claimed his attention. He went about it to the exclusion of all else, and there was a good reason be hind everything he did from the moment he stepped out into the street until the time when he turned back again at evening; though had one chosen to follow him during the day his apparently aimless rambling through Lakkdarol would have seemed very pointless.

* * * *

He must have spent two hours at the least idling by the space port, watching with sleepy, colorless eyes the ships that came and went, the passengers, the vessels lying at wait, the cargoes—particularly the cargoes. He made the rounds of the town’s saloons once more, consuming many glasses of varied liquors in the course of the day and engaging in idle conversation with men of all races and worlds, usually in their own languages, for Smith was a linguist of repute among his contemporaries, He heard the gossip of the spaceways, news from a dozen planets of a thousand different events. He heard the latest joke about the Venusian Emperor and the latest report on the Chino-Aryan war and the latest song hot from the lips of Rose Robertson, whom every man on the civilized planets adored as “the Geor gia Rose.” He passed the day quite profitably, for his own purposes, which do not concern us now, and it was not until late evening, when he turned homeward again, that the thought of the brown girl in his room took definite shape in his mind, though it had been lurking there, formless and submerged, all day.

He had no idea what comprised her usual diet, but he bought a can of New York roast beef and one of Venusian frog-broth and a dozen fresh canal-apples and two pounds of that Earth lettuce that grows so vigorously in the fertile canal-soil of Mars. He felt that she must surely find something to her liking in this broad variety of edibles, and—for his day had been very satisfactory—he hummed “The Green Hills of Earth” to himself in a surprisingly good baritone as he climbed the stairs.

The door was locked, as before, and he was reduced to kicking the lower panels gently with his boot, for his arms were full. She opened the door with that softness that was characteristic of her and stood regarding him in the semi-darkness as he stumbled to the table with his load. The room was unlit again.

“Why don’t you turn on the lights?” he demanded irritably after he had barked his shin on the chair by the table in an effort to deposit his burden there.

“Light and—dark—they are alike—to me,” she murmured.

“Cat eyes, eh? Well, you look the part. Here, I’ve brought you some dinner. Take your choice. Fond of roast beef? Or how about a little frog-broth?”

She shook he head and backed away a step.

“No,” she said. “I can not—eat your food.”

Smith’s brows wrinkled. “Didn’t you have any of the food-tablets?”

Again the red turban shook negatively.

“Then you haven’t had anything for—why, more than twenty-four hours! You must be starved.”

“Not hungry,” she denied.

“What can I find for you to eat, then? There’s time yet if I hurry. You’ve got to eat, child.”

“I shall—eat,” she said softly. “Before long—I shall—feed. I—have no worry.”

She turned away, then, and stood at the window looking out over the moonlit landscape as if to end the conversation. Smith cast her a puzzled glance as he opened the can of roast beef. There had been an odd undernote in that assurance that, indefinably, he did not like. And the girl had teeth and tongue and presumably a fairly human digestive system, to judge from her form. It was nonsense for her to pretend that he could find nothing that she could eat. She must have had some of the food concentrate after all, he decided, prying up the thermos lid of the inner container to release the long-sealed savor of the hot meat inside.