The Lost Bradbury (13 page)

Yeah. I been listening to you talk for five minutes. I still don’t understand. Nothing happened at all. How long I been asleep?

“Two days. Nothing happened, eh? Nothing, except you got the Martians kowtowing, that’s all, brother. Your spectacular performance impressed people. The enemy suddenly decided that if
one
earthman could do what you did, what would happen if a million more came?”

Everybody keeps on with this joking, this lying about Mars. Stop it. Where am I?

“Aboard the rocket, about to take off.”

Leave Earth? No, no, I don’t want to leave Earth, good green Earth! Let go! I’m afraid! Let go of me! Stop the ship!

“Halloway,
this
is Mars—we’re going back
to
Earth.”

Liars, all of you! I don’t want to go to Mars, I want to stay here, on Earth!

“Holy cow, here we go again. Hold him down, Gus. Hey, doctor, on the double! Come help Halloway change his mind back, willya!”

Liars! You can’t do this! Liars! Liars!

 
FINAL VICTIM

(with Henry Hasse)

Bradbury wrote “Final Victim” with fellow science fiction writer Henry Hasse, and it was published in the February 1946 issue of
Amazing Stories
. This was not their first writing collaboration. In 1941, Bradbury and Hasse’s
Pendulum
came out in a pulp magazine, Bradbury’s first appearance in the genre.

* * * *

The space-suited figure scrambled frantically over the edge of the ragged asteroid cliff, and lay panting from the exertion of the long climb upward. The pale face beneath the helmet was drawn in a tight grimace as it stared at the tiny Patrol ship on the plain below. No access to it now! He was trapped.

The young man rose to his feet, stared down the steep ravine he had just traversed. He saw the plodding figure of the Patrolman coming up toward him. There was a frightening relentlessness about that figure. He caught a dull glint of metal and knew the Patrolman had drawn his atomblast.

“If only I hadn’t lost my gun, down there!” And then he laughed bitterly, for he knew he never would have used it. He stepped out in plain sight, threw his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender. His mind was awry with bitter thoughts. He had never killed anyone in all his life! But the Patrol thought he had, and that’s what counted now. He was glad it was all over. He would surrender, go back and face trial though the evidence was all against him.

Now the Patrolman’s bulging, space-suited figure loomed up before him just ten yards away. He raised his hands still higher to make sure the other saw them.

The Patrolman saw them all right. His lips parted in a wide grin beneath his Crystyte plate. He lifted his big hand, full of dull metal, and took careful aim at the young man limned against the cobalt heaven.

There was something strange, and wrong, in the big Patrolman’s grin. The youth waved frantically with his hands and screamed terrified words that only echoed inside his helmet until his eardrums rang. This was crazy! This couldn’t happen! It was never in the Patrol’s code to kill men in cold blood….

His thoughts abruptly ceased. His helmet plate shattered inward and his face was a mask of red. He screamed, but it ended in a gurgling moan, as he tried with futile fingers to tear out the slug that was chewing at his brain. He sank to his knees, toppled over the cliff and did a crazy jerking dance as his gravity plates pulled him to the rock eighty feet below.

Jim Skeel, Patrolman, still grinned.

“Number fourteen,” said he, and holstered his gun.

Jim Skeel stalked triumphantly down to the base of the cliff. He exulted with all six-feet-four of his big sun-parched body. He felt the palms of his hands a little sweaty as he clenched and unclenched them, and a curious tremor came over him as he viewed the body lying there. The familiar pounding of blood was in his temples again, a hot, fierce pounding.

For a long moment he closed his eyes tight and pressed hard fists against his temples and stood there trembling. But the fierce remembrance would not go away, as he knew it would not. Again the scene was with him that had haunted him through the years. Once again the flash of electro-guns tore through his tortured brain, and he saw defenseless men all about him dying and he heard their screams as they died….

He stood quite still until his trembling stopped and that feeling went away. Then with his toe he nudged the young man’s body so that it rolled over, and the pale leprous sunlight licked at the blood-masked features. “Pretty good shot,” Skeel grunted. He bent and searched the body, retrieving all identification cards.

* * * *

A sudden dark shadow swept over the scene. Skeel looked up, startled. Then he knew what it was. Utter night had come without any warning, as it always did on these slowly rotating asteroids. Toward the caverns and crannies at the base of the cliff he glimpsed vague horrid things, pale and wriggling, with sensitive amoeboid tentacles where eyes should have been. He heard strange sibilances from these asteroid creatures who hated light but loved the dark and loved blood, which they got too seldom.

Skeel arose hastily and hurried to his Patrol cruiser a short distance away. He looked back only once, and glimpsed scores of the vague nightmare shapes swarming over a prone human form there in the cliff shadow.

CHAPTER II

Arriving at the Federation Patrol headquarters on Ceres Base, Skeel eased his solo cruiser into the glassite dome with an expert hand. None of the men spoke to him. They tried not even to look at him. But if Jim Skeel noticed this he gave no indication. He sauntered over to the door marked “Commander” and entered without knocking.

Commander Anders looked up from his desk. At sight of Skeel his leather jaw tightened a little. A look of distaste flashed into his steel gray eyes.

“Reporting, sir,” said Skeel. He carefully, a little too carefully, spread out the identification cards he had taken from the fugitive’s pockets.

Anders rose slowly to his feet. His knuckles were white as he placed his fists on the desk and leaned tautly forward.

“You didn’t capture the man?” Anders’ voice was a monotone, as though he had asked that question more than once.

“Sorry, sir. He’s dead.”

“Dead.” There was not much of surprise in Anders’ voice. Then the voice and the gray eyes became simultaneously harder. “Did you kill him?”

“Kill him, sir?” Skeel’s eyebrows arched. “No sir. I had to chase him clear to Asteroid 78 in the Lanisar Group, and there he fell off a cliff. I only had time to get his identification cards and get away, before the night creatures came swarming out. Sorry….”

Anders kicked his chair back against the wall and came surging around the desk. He was white-faced. “Sorry! You’re not sorry, Skeel! In God’s name, how do you have the ghastly nerve to come back here each and every time? How can you face me—no, more than that, how can you face your conscience? I wonder what goes on inside that riveted skull, behind that papier-mâché expression of yours!” He paused and drew a breath. “What makes you kill, Skeel? How many does this make—eleven? Twelve?”

Skeel sighed, and spread his hands in an exaggerated gesture. “You always were a long winded louse, sir. There are Miller’s papers. And I didn’t kill him. He fell off a cliff. Is that all, sir?”

“No! That’s not all!” Anders came even closer, and glared up at Skeel who towered above him. “You’ve been in the Patrol a long time, Skeel. Luckily, or I should say unluckily, your previous good record and your seniority permits you to get away with this—until we prove something. Some day you’ll slip and we
will
prove it. I pray that day’ll come soon!”

* * * *

Skeel’s own eyes, which had been amused, now took on a hard glint. He spoke and his voice was different.

“Since you bring up the subject of my seniority, let me remind you that it would permit me to take your place here if I so chose. I do not so choose—yet. As to the other thing you imagine about me, I could tell you a story, sir. A story that—” He stopped abruptly as the fierce rush of blood came to his throbbing temples again.

“Yes, man, go on! You were about to tell me why you kill.” Anders waited. “Weren’t you!”

“No, sir.” Skeel’s voice was a whisper now, but controlled.

“I know you must have some sort of hellish reason. But whatever the reason, it’s an insult to everything you learned in the Federation Patrol! All right, Skeel, I’ll tell you something about young Miller, your latest victim. He was innocent, do you hear? Innocent! The evidence against him was purely circumstantial, but now he has been cleared! I just got the news an hour ago!”

“You got the news—here? How?”

“Never mind how. It’s authentic!”

Skeel didn’t move a muscle. His face became a little paler and his eyes widened momentarily. Then his face was an impassive mask again.

“You see, Skeel?” Anders was livid with suppressed fury now. “Any normal man would squirm at the news I just told you! Any decent man would blow his brains out at the thought of the ghastly thing he’d done! But not you, Skeel. No, not you, because you’re neither a decent nor a normal man any longer! You’ve allowed this thing to get hold of you until it’s a fetish, it’s warped your brain, and now it’s become a sadistic pleasure…this killing….” Anders choked and couldn’t go on.

“Is that all, sir?”

“That sure as hell is all! Isn’t it enough? Get out of here! Get your filthy face out of my sight before I smash it to pulp.”

* * * *

Skeel’s lips became a tight slash across his square-featured face. He turned on his heel and strode stiffly out.

With an effort Anders stifled the rising anger in him. He strode across the room to the opposite door. It was slightly ajar. He flung it open.

The girl sitting in the next room looked up, but seemed to stare through Anders rather than at him. Her slender uniformed figure was unbending as crystal, her knuckles white as she gripped the arms of the chair. Her eyes, an unbelievable blue, were now misted with the shock of horror. She didn’t bother to brush back the lock of taffy-toned hair that had fallen down against the pallor of her cheek.

Anders spoke.

“You heard, Miss Miller?” he said quietly.

Her breath caught in her throat and it took her some seconds to speak. When she did, her voice was terrible in its tonelessness.

“Yes, I heard…quite enough, Commander. Thanks.”

“I’m truly sorry you had to learn about it this way! But I wanted you to see the man who killed your brother. You wouldn’t have believed me otherwise.”

“I—still find it a little hard to believe—and to understand.” She rose very slowly and stood facing him. There was a world of contempt in her voice. “The Patrol never kills!
That’s
what we’ve learned to believe.
That’s
become a motto on three planets. The Patrol, the noble Patrol, guardians of the spaceways! What mockery! Why was my brother killed, Commander? Why is such a monster as this man Skeel allowed—”

“Miss Miller, please. I know it’s hard for you, or any outsider to understand, but you must try. Skeel was once one of the best men we had. His reputation was clean as flame, and on the records it still is. Very few men stand above him in seniority, and in the Patrol that’s what counts, because—”

“That’s what counts, is it? I came here to Ceres from Mars, bringing my brother’s release papers, only to learn that you’d sent this Skeel out after him; all the time
knowing—”

Anders sighed, and spread his hands helplessly. “I see you still don’t understand. But please believe me, if I’d known your brother was innocent I wouldn’t have allowed Skeel to accept this assignment; no, not even if I’d had to ray him down and face court-martial for it! It was Skeel’s mission if he wanted it. It was his prerogative to accept or refuse the assignment, and he never refuses them. And Miss Miller, I hope
this
will mean something to you: there’s hardly a man in the Patrol who doesn’t suspect Skeel for what he is, and hate him for it; but I doubt if any of ‘em, given the chance, would obliterate him in cold blood. You see the code is ingrained deeply in these men. As yet there’s no proof that Skeel is a killer.”

“You speak glibly of proof,” the girl echoed mockingly. “Why don’t you
get
proof?”

“I’m going to! Personally. A frame-up is the only way. But it’ll be hard, because the man always works alone.”

“Yes, and then there is always the code against you. Well, Commander, I have no such code to hamper me, and I am going to avenge my brother!” Nadia Miller’s face, ordinarily lovely, was not lovely now. “I have a plan. I could use your help, but with or without your help I am going through with it. All I want is to get this man Skeel back out to those rocks—alone.”

* * * *

Anders smiled tolerantly.

“That would be a dangerous thing, especially for a girl. Skeel’s a deadly killer, an expert shot. And you’d be on your own; the Patrol couldn’t sanction any such plan.”