Collected Short Fiction, page 567
The female-thing cackled shrilly. It changed shape again.
Now it was a Martian, thin and spectral, seven feet high, sad-eyed, angular, gaunt. The Martian held a knife-blade in one eight-fingered hand. As Gustafson watched, the Martian placed the blade in the center of its own belly, and jabbed the knife sharply in, twisted upward, slashed open the leathery skin. Entrails came spilling out, alien entrails, glowing yellow.
The Martian laughed as its guts tumbled forth. Then it said, in its own language, “Sleep well, Gustafson. This is only the beginning.”
And it vanished.
Gustafson slumped back against his pillow, quivering with terror, his pajamas gluing themselves to his sweat-clammy body. After a long moment he reached above his head and touched the luminator stud. The room filled with brightness.
He got out of bed. The door was locked from the inside, and had not been disturbed. The window, too, was fastened. He looked out, down. His hotel room was seventy-nine stories above the New York sidewalk. It was impossible for anyone to enter.
Kneeling, he examined the thick carpet. He remembered vividly the way the blood of the self-disemboweled Martian had poured out. But there were no stains on the carpet.
It had been a dream, then. A nightmare.
Or had it?
He could not get the mocking words of the Martian from his mind: Sleep well, Gustafson? This is only the beginning. . . .
BUT, of course, it had not been the beginning. The beginning had been six months earlier, on Mars. Gustafson had been a trader on Mars, roaming the desert outlands in search of good deals. There weren’t many Martians, and those who were still alive made it their business to stay away from the Earthman settlements. But a man with ingenuity and a little courage could go out into the desert and pile up a sizable fortune trading with and fleecing the native Martians.
Gustafson had ingenuity and Gustafson had enough courage to get by with. More than that, Gustafson had an unstoppable lust for wealth.
In his year on Mars he had already struck enough good deals to pay his passage twenty times over. He had better than a hundred thousand credits on deposit at the branch office of the Solar System Bank. He was a wealthy man. But he wanted a little more, just a little more, before he called it quits and went back to Earth to live on the money he had piled up.
And then, in the desert a thousand miles from Marsport, Gustafson had come across the Martian wearing a diamond as big as a man’s fist on a chain round his neck.
Gustafson had encountered the Martian on a lonely desert path. The cold wind blew gusts of orange-red sand through the forsaken wastes. But the stone around the Martian’s neck was big enough to stop traffic for miles in any direction.
The Martian looked like any other member of his race—an animated beanpole covered with old brown leather. It towered high above Gustafson, wheezing faintly as it breathed, its sad eyes shielded from the sandstorms by a transparent flap of membrane.
Gustafson said, in Martian, “I want to buy that stone you’ve got around your neck.”
“The stone is not for sale, Earthman. It is holy. I wear it as a sacred trust. It must not be sold. Can you not understand that?”
Gustafson moistened his lips speculatively. It was an uncut gem of enormous size—nine hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred carats? But more impressive than its mere size was its beauty. It was a perfect gem, unflawed, sheer ice with glowing flame imprisoned within it. As the rays of the dim sun glanced off it, it seemed to blaze with its own, not reflected, light.
It was worth millions on Earth, Gustafson thought. He could certainly sell it for twenty million. And twenty million credits, invested at six percent—why, he could live like a prince for the rest of his life on the income alone! No more grubbing around in Martian deserts. He had to have that gem!
“I’ll give you twenty-five thousand credits for it,” Gustafson said impulsively. “Five thousand right now, in cash, and the rest as a check drawn on the Solar System Bank. I’m Emil Gustafson, the trader. Everyone knows me. My check is good.”
“The stone is not for sale.”
“Fifty thousand,” Gustafson shouted. “I’ll drive you to the nearest bank and they’ll cash the check for you before you have to hand over the stone. Eh, there? Fifty thousand credits?”
“I do not need money. The stone is not for sale, Earthman Gustafson.”
Gustafson drew in a deep breath. He could bid as high as a hundred thousand credits for the diamond—it would wipe out his liquid assets, but he was certain to get millions for the stone once he brought it back to Earth for sale. But if the Martian was not even tempted by fifty thousand credits, a hundred thousand would not interest him either. Gustafson had dealt with Martians long enough to know that their obstinacy sometimes cannot be broken down by any amount of money.
But there was another way.
No one paid much attention to the comings and goings of Martians. Hardly any Earthman on Mars could even tell one Martian from the next. There was little contact between the two races, except for traders such as Gustafson.
No one would ever know, if this Martian here were to vanish suddenly. And Gustafson could always claim to have found the jewel himself. “There it was,” he might say. “Sticking right up out of the desert. I almost tripped over it before I saw it. Beauty, isn’t it?”
Yes. So simple.
Gustafson drew his knife.
The Martian understood, but he stepped backward too slowly, and Gustafson plunged the knife into the leathery skin between the ribs, and slashed upward, through the vital organs. The Martian uttered a little wheezing gasp and began to sag slowly to the ground as Gustafson withdrew the blade.
In a bubbling voice of death the Martian said, “You will not enjoy what you have stolen, Gustafson. We. . . . will. . . . follow you. . . . wherever you go. . . . we will go after you. . . . and you will die. . . .”
His entrails exposed, the Martian died in a thick rush of greenish-yellow blood. Kneeling, Gustafson deftly removed the massive diamond from its mounting round the Martian’s neck. He hefted the jewel; it was enormously heavy. Fifteen hundred carats, Gustafson thought.
Burying the Martian was simple. Gustafson merely dug a shallow hole in the sand and rolled the corpse in. There was no need for any other concealment. Within an hour, the shifting sand would bury the site under a dune a dozen feet high. No one would ever come prowling around in this wasteland.
Gustafson packed the diamond carefully in his rucksack and turned his sandcrawler back toward Marsport. He had no need for further commerce on Mars. He was as wealthy as he would ever need to be.
FOUR weeks later, he was in New York. Bidding was under way for the diamond. Half a dozen jewel merchants were considering their bids. Gustafson, claiming to hate publicity, kept his name from the public. It was known that an enormous diamond had been brought back from Mars, but only six jewel dealers knew the actual identity of the owner, and they were sworn to silence.
Finally the diamond was sold. The top offer was twenty-seven million credits. For tax purposes, Gustafson arranged that he would be paid at a rate of one million credits a year for the next twenty-seven years. He was rich, rich for life.
And that night, the creatures came for the first time.
He had established himself temporarily in a New York hotel, registering under an assumed name. In a few days the initial check would come through from the diamond dealer, and he would be free to go wherever he pleased. But, that night, the creatures came.
Gustafson did not sleep after the visitation. He tossed and turned, looking up every few minutes to see if the ghostly intruder had returned.
Finally morning came. Struggling from bed, Gustafson stared at his puffy face in the mirror. His skin, which had been tanned once, looked pale now, like the underbelly of a fish. His eyes were the eyes of a frightened man.
It had all been a dream, he decided. No one could have entered the room.
Some of the old settlers on Mars told stories about the natives, Gustafson remembered. That they had strange mental powers, that they were telepathic, that they could send mental images over great distances. Gustafson had always scoffed at such stories. There was no proof, was there? It was just a lot of ridiculous jetwash.
But maybe it was true, he admitted now.
Could it be possible? That the Martian he had murdered had been in telepathic contact with another Martian, and so the identity of the murderer was known? And that they were striking back at him across the gulf of interplanetary space, across forty million miles of nothingness, sending telepathic nightmare images out of the Martian desert to haunt his dreams as he slept in the plush comfort of this New York hotel?
Impossible.
But yet—what other explanation was there, he asked himself?
HE stayed in his room all that day. He ordered his meals sent up, and opened the door cautiously each time the room-service robot signalled. The rest of the time, Gustafson kept the door and windows locked. He spent the day watching video, but the three-dimensional dancing images did not interest him. Angrily he snapped the set off and paced his room in impatient fury.
Phantoms reaching out across space—fantastic, he thought contemptuously!
But yet, when he went to sleep that night, the phantoms returned.
There were two of them this night. One at each side of his bed, their bodies changing form with protean rapidity, undulating through metamorphosis after revolting metamorphosis. Some of the time they were female shapes, with certain parts grotesquely exaggerated. Or else they were hideous nightmare monsters that oozed loathsome slime, and swelled until they seemed to take up all the space there was in the hotel room.
They took the shape of flabby masses of living flesh, topped with saucer-like eyes and covered with pustulent gaping sores. They adopted the form of ghastly beaked things with writhing sucker-rimmed tentacles. From form to form they mutated, while Gustafson sat clutching his knees in fright.
“You aren’t real!” he shouted, as eerie creatures drifted through his darkened room.
“Phantoms, that’s all you are! This is a nightmare I’m having!”
But he shivered with fear, knowing that either he was going insane or else the Martians had found some way of taking their revenge on him at long distance. Neither thought was a comforting one.
Through shape-change after shape-change the eerie visitors went. At one point they seemed to shatter, forming again into a cloud of moths that fluttered round Gustafson’s head, never actually touching him but coming so close that he could almost feel their feathery touch. Then moths coalesced into something huge and flat that clung to the walls, rippling slowly like a coating of slime, opening an immense mouth to leer at the terrified Earthman.
And then, finally, they took the form of the Martian he had killed. Now there were two of them, one to the right, one to the left.
They plunged the knives into themselves. Their entrails poured forth.
Speaking with one voice they said, “We will be with you every night, Gustafson. Think that you’ll get to like us?”
THEY winked out of sight and were gone.
Gustafson rose shakily from bed. The room was empty, door, windows still sealed. He took a pill and fell instantly into deep, dream-tormented sleep. The faces of the monsters kept rising out of the well of his unconscious to glare at him.
In the morning, he was a nerve-shattered wreck. A few more nights such as this and he would be ready for a rest home.
Or suicide.
Once again, he spent the day in his room. He was afraid to go out, now—afraid that a phantom might materialize just as he was crossing the street, and frighten him into the path of an oncoming auto. Even though the room was not able to keep the nightmare creatures out, he told himself that he was safer up here than anywhere else.
During the day he phoned room service and asked to have a blaster sent up, charged to his account. A blank-faced robot brought the weapon almost at once.
Gustafson waited. Night fell. He undressed and got into bed.
If phantoms can talk, Gustafson thought, maybe they can be shot with a blaster.
He counted the moments until darkness was complete.
Still no monsters appeared. He closed his eyes, pretended to be sleeping. He sensed a glow in the room, and carefully lifted the corner of an eyelid.
There were three of them, this time.
One had the shape of a feathered serpent. Another looked like a cat with a swollen bulb of a head five times normal size. The third was a woman who had a dozen breasts.
The metamorphosis began. Shapes changed. Now there crouched slavering at the side of the bed a wolf-thing with fangs a foot long. Blobs of light danced in the air. Witchfire, it was, Gustafson thought.
He let the hell-dance go on for five minutes. Then, carefully, he drew the blaster from hiding. It was a fine weapon, with an adjustable nozzle. He tuned it so it would fire a stream of energy no wider than a needle.
Drawing it suddenly, Gustafson fired. An energy-bolt penetrated a capering monster. It winked out like a snuffled candle.
He fired again, at the second creature, catching it as it changed from one form to the next. It, too, vanished as the energy-bolt hit it.
Gustafson exulted. It was working! He was destroying them!
Then he heard cackling behind him. A new creature! A second! A third! The room was full of them!
As fast as Gustafson fired, a new one sprang up to take the place of the one that had winked out. He realized that they had been deluding him, that he had not been destroying the phantom monsters at all. And his blaster was nearly empty.
All the creatures collected now, near the window. There were a dozen of them, huddled together, pointing fingers and hands and tentacles and boneless limbs at Gustafson, laughing, laughing. . . .
He fired. The bolt seared right through them, obliterating them, and carried right on through the window. Cool air rushed in. The window gaped open. And creatures still capered in a witch’s dance about him.
Gustafson squeezed the firing stud again. No good; the charge was exhausted. The stud clicked twice. Panicky, scowling, he hurled the gun from him. It clattered against the wall. He heard laughter echoing all about him.
“You are very funny, Gustafson,” the voices were saying. “You look so very frightened. . . .”
“Damn you, come here so I can get you! How can I fight ghosts?”
The room was seared and scarred by his wild blastershots. Twelve images of the Martian he had killed glared at him. Twelve thin-lipped mouths laughed at him.
Gustafson’s heart pounded. He wanted to strike out, wanted to kill. But there was nothing he could touch, nothing solid.
THE door of the room opened suddenly.
“That’s impossible,” Gustafson grunted. “It’s locked. I know it is.”
But there was no denying the fact that it was opening. He saw it slowly turning inward, saw the thin, eight-fingered hand snaking round it, saw—
Saw the Martian enter. Bloody, with flecks of sand clinging to the raw edges of the gaping wound. The phantoms vanished abruptly. Only the Martian remained, stalking across the room toward Gustafson, fingers outstretched as if vengefully seeking Gustafson’s throat.
He backed away, toward the open window. Just he and the Martian—the dead Martian—
“Keep away! Keep away from me!”
“You killed me, Gustafson. . . .”
“Get back! Don’t come near me!”
“You killed me, Gustafson.”
The Earthman could not retreat any further. He was right at the window now. And the Martian kept on coming. Panic-stricken, Gustafson clambered up on the window ledge, not caring that he was hundreds of feet above the ground. He had to escape that inexorably advancing Martian, that was all.
The Martian was inches away, hands groping. Gustafson tottered on the window ledge. He could not go back any more. He was losing his balance. He was. . . .
His vision cleared suddenly. He could see that the door was locked. There were no glowing phantom figures in the room.
He heard knocking on the door. “Mr. Gustafson! Mr. Gustafson, are you all right? We heard blaster shots! Open the door, Mr. Gustafson!”
But Gustafson could not open the door. Crouched on the window ledge, his back to the sky, he uttered a dry, croaking sound and, all energy drained from him, allowed himself to fall backward, backward and out, out and down, seventy-nine stories to the street, while laughter followed him every foot of the drop.
And on Mars, forty million miles away, emaciated aliens smiled at each other knowingly. They had taken their grim revenge.
THE END
Certainty
No organization can function if a clearly transmitted message cannot produce the intended effect. If, no matter what the order is, it always comes out the same, unwanted way . . .
COLONEL Dean Wharton gripped the solido firmly between finger and thumb, and stared into its glossy depths.
Color began to rise slowly in his face. The solido showed a spaceship of unmistakably alien design descending, in a landing orbit, toward the surface of the uninhabited planet known in Terran charts as Bartlett V. Bartlett V was a Terran observation outpost. An alien landing on it was an infringement of Terran sovereignty. Colonel Wharton scowled.
Glaring straight into the pale, uneasy face of Lieutenant Crosley, Wharton said, “How long ago was this picture taken?”
“About an hour, sir. But you were in Deepsleep, and we didn’t think—”
“No, you didn’t think,” Wharton said acidly. “O.K., let’s have the rest of the story. You sent warnings to the ship, I hope.”
Crosley nodded. “We beamed them wide-channel in Terran, General Galactic, Dormirani, Leesor, and Fawd. We sent the same message in each language: telling them that this is a Terran observation outpost, that they can’t land here without prior permission, that they would have to depart at once, By this time they had completed their landing. We estimate their position at about one hundred twenty miles northeast of here, on the Creston Plateau.”
