The third frank belknap.., p.29
The Third Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction, page 29
Vengeance? Impossible! He had no enemies here. But that didn’t change the fact that bullets were ploughing into the sand only a yard from his head, and suddenly one shattered the wall at his back. The blast seemed timed to unnerve him, and the crash of the falling debris snapped him to action. He wanted to get his hands on that sniper—just once.
Cautiously he raised himself and stared out over the sandy waste. Forty feet away loomed the entrance to an abandoned mine shaft. It was a tangled mass of wreckage, but framed for an instant in the darkness was a shape that bobbed and weaved about and seemed the opposite of mechanical.
Oakland felt as if a hundred eyes were watching him, wondering what his next move would be. Should he risk a leap? Ordinarily a man who caught the glint of sunlight on a gun barrel and hurled himself straight toward almost certain death would be acting against all reason. But Oakland hated inertia. Sweating it out in a stalemate simply did not appeal to him.
He rose automatically, muscles tensing.
His leap when it came was like an uncoiled spring. He shot forward with the prowess of a man to whom physical fitness was the first law of life.
The leap carried him almost to the edge of the wreckage. He hit the sand as softly as a cat, straightened and plunged forward with a shout that echoed through the city like a thunderclap. As the ruins rolled the echo back a blast of deadly gunfire barely missed him. It singed his face, blew away his sun-shield, and whirled him furiously about.
He fell to his knees, shook his head stubbornly, and crawled forward until he was staring directly into the mine shaft, realizing that his recklessness had completely betrayed him.
Before him in the gloom were eyes narrowed and cold, above the barrel of an energy weapon aimed directly at his heart. Facing him was a gaunt scarecrow of a man at least eighty years old, his lips chafed by wind and rain, his snow-white hair plastered to his forehead by sweat and grime.
He wore the patched space-leather of a first-generation colonist, and to Oakland he seemed to be a man linked in some mysterious fashion to the supernatural.
Yet Oakland was not deceived. The man in the shaft was a flesh-and-blood reality, as dangerous as any young man could have been walking in the open with an implacable will to destruction guiding his every move.
There was no margin of safety left, for Oakland was facing at point-blank range a weapon that could take away his life. The fact that he was holding a trump card was no guarantee that the man in the shaft would not think that he was bluffing.
Even if he played the card well a man with such power to destroy might blast in blind hatred, scornful of retribution. It was an even risk, but Oakland knew that he would have to take it.
“It isn’t as simple as you think,” he warned, in a strained whisper. “I’ve a micro-transmitter right here in my hand. At a word from me these ruins will be blown sky high!”
The face in the shaft came closer. Sunlight slanted down over it, bringing the features into harsh relief.
“So you went and undermined the city!” came in a despairing voice. “The first city on Mars, the real city. You undermined it, and are going to blow it up.”
“We had no choice,” Oakland said. “You can’t keep a legend alive forever. Is that why you tried to kill me, old fool?”
“No!” The voice was suddenly vehement with denial. “I’m not a murderer! I thought you were after me.”
“After you?” Oakland’s eyes grew probing. “Just why should you think that?”
“Look at me!” the old man said. “Take a good look. Don’t you know who I am?”
“Martin Steele!” he whispered, as recognition came.
“A man with a price on his head,” the old man said. “For fifty years a fox with no hole to hide in, no place to rest his head.”
“Martin Steele!”
“Once I went to the New City,” Steele said. “I went at night and I walked along the streets like a man with the right to hold up his head. Not one to be hunted, but to be greeted with respect.”
The old man threw back his head and chuckled, but there was no real mirth in his stare.
“There was a big show going on,” he said, the veins on his neck standing out like whipcords. “A moving picture show. We had them seventy years ago on Earth when I was a boy. I can still remember how the women looked on the big screen. We had television, sure. But the big screen lasted right up until the first passenger-carrying rocket took off for Mars.
“So in the New City I saw this picture. Nothing fancy about the title. Just ‘Martin Steele’. They didn’t call me an outlaw and a murderer. They didn’t say I couldn’t raise my glass and say to my fellow man: ‘Hello, friend! It’s a nice morning, isn’t it? Sun’s bright, and we’re not fighting like wildcats any more to hold what we’ve won from the desert and the nickel-rock landslides.”
In the shadows Oakland’s eyes sought Steele’s fingers, noticed that they now were wound less tightly about the weapon in his clasp.
“Outside they didn’t call me a hunted man,” Steele went on. “Fifty years is a long time. So I went inside and in the darkness saw myself as a lad of twenty-two. Fastest gun on all Mars. The kid who could glide away and disappear without getting himself all chewed up inside.”
“I saw that picture two nights ago,” Oakland said.
A slow flush of gratification crept up over the old man’s cheekbones.
“You saw it? I’m glad. They sure made a mighty fine figure out of me. They showed me killing in self-defense and in self-defense only. And so help me—it was true. I never in my life shot a man down in cold blood.”
Oakland’s eyes narrowed, watching the gun dip lower, watching the scarred old fingers grow lax.
He was not deceived. He had seen it happen time and time again. A man at the limit of his endurance forgetting to be cautious as he mind returned to the grandeur of the past.
A false move and the gun would roar. A false move—and there’d be another grave marker where he had played as a child. He could almost see the desert-scoured lettering as he returned Steele’s stare:
JAMES OAKLAND BORN 2031
DIED IN THE LINE OF DUTY 2063
The line of duty! What absurd tricks the mind could play. A man couldn’t be buried in a city marked for destruction. Oakland forced himself to concentrate on the fatal flaw in the armor which Steele had worn for fifty years.
Steele liked to talk about the past. All old men did, but in Steele the urge was sharpened by loneliness. A trump card if played close to the chest—It was as if Steele had plucked some hypnotic flower of the desert night distilling a fragrance which sent him careening back to his youth—plucked it to shed its petals one by one.
It was a fatal weakness in so old a man. His eyes sharp with purpose, Oakland told himself that if Steele went right on talking the gun would sink lower, the tired old hands grow palsied.
But Steele startled him by challenging him at a vital point.
“Why are you going to blow up the Old City?” he demanded. “What kind of a man are you? You’d do better to buy yourself a coffin.”
“If you went to the New City you must have heard the talk,” Oakland said. “There were debates, discussions. On Earth it was done too. You can’t be too sentimental about the past. There are rude beginnings in every great culture when men have to fight and kill to stay alive. Sometimes they have to resort to violence which can’t be glorified.”
“Talk like that doesn’t mean much,” Steele said. “Sure, we had to fight to stay alive. But judging from that moving picture we didn’t do so badly.”
“Fifty years ago you laid the groundwork for a legend,” Oakland said. “The youth of today glorifies you because youth is naturally adventurous and would like to live as you did without killing anyone. What they forget is that when you fought to stay alive you were a killer by choice.”
“Not by choice,” Steele protested. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
“You ‘defended’ yourself ruthlessly—with cruelty and cunning. You were an outlaw when other men managed to live within the framework of the law.”
“Son, they took away my land. The respectable element you praise didn’t like me because I was independent and hotheaded and just a bit reckless. But I wasn’t really so different. I wanted to see the first colony on Mars become great just as much as they did.”
“You’re still wanted for murder!” Oakland said, his eyes accusing.
“After fifty years, son, a man’s memory grows dim. But I do know this. I was never a murderer.”
“You asked me why I’ve been sent here to blow up fifty square miles of ruins,” Oakland said. “I’ll tell you. They are monuments of a past that is best forgotten. On Earth we made the mistake of glorifying the past. We lived so much in the past that the future became a nightmare.
“Here on Mars we intend to go forward more boldly. If there were not laws prohibiting it, tourists would flock here by the thousands. Youth has a tendency to idealize the primitive. The decision to destroy this city was made because it has served its purpose and is just dead wood blocking the way to progress.”
“Dead wood?” Steele’s eyes flared in protest. “Son, I saw this city grow right out of the desert with the sap of life pulsing in its veins. When a tree grows too fast big ridges form on it. Men get scared of it and move away from it. Maybe it dies a bit. But the heart of it never dies. If you let it alone it stays alive enough to send out green shoots for a thousand years.”
Indignation did it—not weariness, but the urge to defend something so big that weapons became an insult to human dignity. Steele put his gun down and started to get to his feet, using both hands to gesture with.
Oakland was stunned by the simplicity of his victory. He had anticipated a struggle, a life-and-death grapple on the sand with a man who had killed too often to be squeamish about one more murder. Now he need only lean forward and pick up the gun to make Steele his captive. He moved quickly. Training the weapon on Steele, he said in a voice that trembled a little, “Raise your arms—and don’t try any tricks!”
For an instant Steele stared at the gun as if he had no recollection at all of having relinquished it.
It was a tragic moment for both of them. Into Steele’s eyes came a sudden glint of compassion, of sympathy for the man who had taken him captive.
“I never really expected you to understand, son,” he said. “In fifty years almost all of a man dies. When you bring him to judgment after all that time you’re punishing him for the crimes of a stranger. You might say he remembers how that stranger felt and thought and acted, but memory’s too thin a thread to hang a judgment on.”
“I’m sorry,” Oakland said, choosing his words with care, “but to me murder is a scarlet thread so woven into the fabric of a man’s destiny that nothing can make it fade.”
“It’s all right, son,” Steele said, wearily. “You just happened along fifty years too late.”
He stood blinking in the desert glare, his arms upraised and his shoulders held straight. Incredibly scrawny his arms seemed, with the veins standing out like knotted cords. There was no hint of the power that had made him a hero—and a fugitive.
“Where are you taking me?” Steele asked.
“To the New City,” Oakland said. “Tomorrow we’ll start out.”
“And tonight?”
“We’ll camp here. It’s as good a place as any.”
A look of desperation came to Martin Steele’s eyes. “You won’t give the signal, son? You’ll give the Old City one more week of life? You can use my capture as an excuse—”
Oakland looked down at his feet, firm-planted on the soil which had nourished his childhood.
“We’ll see,” he said.
“If your mind is made up it doesn’t matter where we camp,” Steele said.
“No,” Oakland agreed.
“There are a few places I’d like to see just once more, son.”
“For instance?”
“First year we put up a ball park. I’d like to stand in the pitcher’s box, and pick up a stone and hurl it. Then I’d like to sit down at a table in the New Mars Cafe. I’d like to turn on the three-dimensional image projector, and see Molly Minton dance again.”
“Molly Minton?”
“She was dust when you were a babe in arms, son!”
Oakland shrugged wearily. “Well—we know where we stand now. We can make a tour of the ruins if you wish.”
Thus it was that two men separated by a gulf of time moved forward into the twilight of a city that had lost control of its own destiny, yet somehow seemed to know that it still lived and could take pride in its native sons…
* * * *
They had been walking toward the city’s edge in silence when the old man looked pleadingly at Oakland and said, “You haven’t forgotten the promise you made me? You said we’d go to the New Mars Cafe and see Molly Minton dance again.”
“If it would give you pleasure,” Oakland said. “It’s all right with me.”
“You knew her?” Oakland asked, his mouth suddenly dry. “You knew and talked to a woman as beautiful as that?”
“I held her in my arms,” Steele said.
For a hypnotic moment Molly Minton seemed to be dancing for Steele alone.
She glided and jetted and appeared to float in the air, her toes pointing downward and her arms flung wide. Her eyes were wide and disarming, the eyes of a child indifferent to passion or remorse.
There was a faint click, and she was gone. The light dimmed and vanished, and the image projector loomed again through the shadows with a faint gleaming, a lifeless automaton demanding the homage of another coin.
Oakland sat staring at his companion in silent awe. The old man’s features had changed, and for an instant he seemed almost young again, with a look in his eyes that took him out of the pioneer breed and reclassified him.
He looked like a youngish man whom a woman might well have taken joy in tormenting to add a bright feather to her career as a temptress. He looked as well like the kind of man who would be capable of making a complete fool of himself over one woman while a dozen others fought over him.
A young romantic fool, unaware of his great gifts of body and mind, carrying within himself the seeds of his own destruction.
“It’s curious, son,” Steele murmured, “how a man’s entire life can hinge on a moment’s recklessness. I’ve always believed that for every gift of nature something must surely be taken away.”
Steele waved his hand, as if to brush away a memory that had returned at the wrong time.
“If a man has been given strength and health he will never know what it means to watch the sun come up from a solitary cot of pain, or how beautiful the world can seem when life is ebbing fast and every precious moment must be lived to the full. If he has been given wealth he loses the joy of hewing out for himself an empire in the wilderness. And if a woman has been given beauty—”
Steele raised his eyes and looked straight at the image projector. “If a woman has been given beauty there is a very great danger that she will lose her soul.”
Oakland knew that Steele could not be stopped now, that there was something on his mind that was crying for release. “Tell me about her,” he urged.
* * * *
Steele said wearily. “It was fifty years ago. But time doesn’t ease the pain much—when something brings it back. I had my own plot of land, my own house. I could have built for the future and had no trouble with the law. But when I met Molly Minton every plan I had built itself around her and I could imagine no future apart from her.
“I was an awkward young fellow, clumsy in the presence of women, but I’d never met a woman like Molly before. I said to myself: ‘Here’s a woman I could stand with against the world.’ Her life had been all struggle, all pain. There was sordidness in it and violence, but I didn’t care about that. To me she was something wonderful and good.”
The New Mars Cafe wasn’t crowded. Dust covered all of the chairs and tables, and the shining appurtenances where men weary of struggle and frustration had slipped coins into narrow slots and watched women dance whose gift of beauty had once seemed s inexhaustible as light and flame.
They sat down at a table near the door, festooned with cobwebs.
“Sorry I can’t order drinks, son,” Steele said. “Molly Minton deserves a treat for her great gift of betrayal.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Oakland said.
“You will in a minute, son. May I get up?”
“Go ahead,” Oakland said.
Steele rose and walked to a three-dimensional image projector that still glittered with a blue metallic sheen after fifty years of neglect. He fumbled in his pocket for a coin and miraculously found one. Oakland watched with fascinated curiosity as shaking fingers dropped the coin into a slot that should have been clogged with rust.
Steele returned to the table and reseated himself. There was a sudden whirring, and a shaft of light poured from the projector and coalesced into a cone of radiance a yard from the table.
Into the radiance came a gliding human form, solidifying out of the darkness as if summoned by Martin Steele’s nod.
And Molly Minton danced again. It was unbelievable, but a woman who had been dust for half a century danced in three-dimensional splendor, her arms upraised and her head thrown back.
“Look at her hair, son,” Steele murmured. “A river of gold it was—and gold could have bought every strand of it.”
Looking steadily at the projector, Steele tightened his lips.
“I asked her to marry me. We’d set a date for the wedding, and were making plans. Then one evening I decided to go into town and celebrate my last week as a bachelor.
