Collected Short Fiction, page 618
And then he had started to fall, toppling into the thick wine-red carpet of Louise’s bedroom, lying there with his hands dug deep into the high pile rug, while eddies of pain rippled through him, and above him sounded their mocking laughter and Louise’s repeated cry of “Die, you old fool! Die! Die!”
So that was the way it had been. Massey recalled everything, now, and he understood. The shock of finding Louise and Henry Marshall that way had touched off the heart attack that had been inevitable for so long. He had lain on the floor in Louise’s bedroom, unconscious, in a coma, perhaps, and somehow—somehow—the doctors had decided he was dead.
It was incredible. Had life indeed been flickering so feebly in him that the high-priced medicos had failed to realize he still lived? Or—the thought chilled Massey there in the darkness—had Louise and her lover found some complacent doctor who, for a fee, would certify death when death had not really come? What if Louise had known he was still alive, though unconscious, and had knowingly placed him in this coffin and sent him to the darkness of the grave?
A terrible passion came to life in Massey. He would get out! He had won before, in corporation matters, in proxy fights, in struggles of every kind. He was a mild-mannered man on the surface, but his will was all-consuming once it was aroused.
He would free himself.
Somehow.
Massey vowed to escape from this grave, whether he lay under a ton of soil or not. He would return to life, come back from the grave. Punish Louise for her crime, make her atone for her mocking infidelity.
I’ll get out, he swore to himself. I won’t die here like a trapped rat.
The word “rat” brought a new and even more ghastly thought to mind. He had heard legends of the graveyard rats, great slug-shaped creatures with blazing red eyes and 120 tails like scaled serpents, who tunneled under the graveyards and gnawed their way into the new graves to devour the flesh of recent corpses.
Suppose they came for him? Suppose, even now as he lay here, the graveyard beasts squatted in their unmentionable tunnels below his coffin, nibbling at the wood with yellowed teeth, gnawing, biting, scratching, boring ominously inward.
How the rats would rejoice when they found a living man within the coffin!
Massey had always had a vivid imagination. Now, with darkness settled like a cloak about him, he found himself unable to make that imagination cease functioning. Sharply in the eye of his mind he saw the gleeful cascade of rats pouring through the breach in the coffin wall, saw dozens of the foul beasts launching themselves on him with more burrowing greedily in from all sides. He pictured the rats madly joyous at the discovery of a live being, of fresh meat.
He saw their bristly snouts nuzzling at the soft pink flesh of his throat. He could picture their razor-keen teeth meeting beneath his chin, while his outraged blood spurted out over them. He could feel the animals quarreling with each other for the right to devour the tender morsels that were his eyes.
What was that? That sound?
A fitful champing and chewing sound, was it? As of hundreds of rats patiently gnawing at the sleek fresh wood of his coffin?
No, he thought. More imagination. There was no sound. Everything was utterly silent. It was, he thought, the silence of—of the grave.
Then he wondered how he could still retain a sense of humor. How, for that matter, he could still retain any shred of his sanity, trapped like this.
He could no longer preserve the fiction that he was still lying in state in some undertaker’s parlor. Coffins do not normally have locks; the only reason why he had been unable to lift the lid was that he was already in the ground. No doubt Louise and her lover had rushed him into the ground as fast as they could.
They would be in for a surprise, Massey thought with calmness that surprised himself. Calmness was what he needed now. In the same way as he had piloted so many complicated financial maneuvers, James Ronald Massey now set to work to think of a way to escape from the living grave to which he had been condemned.
Pushing at the lid was futile. He had already tried that a dozen unsuccessful times. But perhaps he could break the lid, claw his way upward through the dirt till he reached the surface.
He felt in the darkness for the satin lining of the coffin. The air hung like a moist cloth around him now. He realized he had no more than a few minutes’ air left, and then the hideous slow death of strangulation would start.
Better that than the rats, he told himself. I don’t want to be alive if the rats break into the coffin. I’d rather choke to death than be eaten alive. Yes. Much better to choke.
His hands clawed at the satin and ripped it away, shredding the expensive cloth. Now he could feel the smooth cool pine boards from which his coffin had been made. The wood had been planed and sanded to a perfect finish. He laughed, a little wildly. Probably Louise had bought him the most expensive coffin that could be found. “Nothing but the best for my poor dead darling husband,” she must have told the undertaker.
He began to pound at the wood, hoping he would hear it splinter. But the wood held. He gasped for breath, knowing just a bit of fresh air remained, that now the torture would begin. He could barely fill his lungs. He drew in a deep breath and nearly retched at the nauseous taste of the stale air.
Weirdly he wondered if perhaps they had laid him in his grave upside-down. Perhaps he did not face the sky, and perhaps he was really digging at the bottom of his coffin instead of the top. In that case, even if he did succeed in breaking through the solid wood he would be far from free.
Impossible, he thought. A joke of my tired mind. He had to keep trying. Couldn’t give up now. Not now, when the air would be gone in minutes, and the rats lay waiting, waiting for him.
His hands, which had never done any kind of manual labor, now clawed and scraped desperately at the unyielding wood of the coffin lid. His nails raked the mocking 122 pine boards again and again, as if he thought to dig his way through the wood splinter by splinter. His nails ripped away one by one and blood streamed down his fingers, and he felt the bright hotness of the terrible pain, but still he clawed.
And screamed.
“Help me! Can’t you hear me? I’m buried alive in here! Alive! I’ll give 10 thousand dollars to any man who gets me out! Twenty thousand! Fifty thousand! Do you hear me, 50 thousand dollars!”
He might just as well have offered the moon and the stars. No one heard his call; no one answered him. The funeral was probably long since over, the mourners dispersed. At this moment perhaps Louise and Henry Marshall were making love and laughing to each other about the fortune that now was theirs.
“Help me! Help me!”
His broken fingers clawed futilely at the wooden barrier above him, clawed until his nerves were numbed by constant agony and he could feel no more pain. The air was all but gone, now.
Part of his mind was still clear. Part was still engaged in formulating plans. Break a hole in the coffin lid, he thought. Widen it. Claw through the dirt to the surface. The soil will still be loose and soft. You can push it to one side if you can only get out of this coffin. Get your head above air, breathe the fresh air again, call for help.
Then settle with Louise and Henry.
It was all so simple—all but the first step. He could not get a purchase on the wood. The air was a vile moist thing now, and he could feel the cold hand of asphyxiation tightening steadily round his throat. The staleness of the air was making thought more difficult; he could barely think clearly any more. And he seemed to hear the rats again, chewing tirelessly at the wood, as if they knew that a living being lay in the wooden box, as if they yearned to get to Massey while the warm blood still pulsed in his veins.
And his heart—the heart whose sudden failure had been mistaken for death—his heart now pounded wildly from his exertions, and the pain that shot through him was ten times the torment he had experienced that night in Louise’s bedroom. He wondered how long he could stand the combined assault.
The rats . . . the rats coming to get me . . . and the air almost gone . . . the darkness . . . my heart, my heart! . . . I’ll need a miracle to get out of here now . . . my heart! The pain!
The pain!
Sudden tranquility stole over Massey. He smiled, and realized that the pain had diminished. He felt calm and assured now.
How foolish he had been to work so hard to get out of his coffin! There was such an easier way to do it!
All he had to do was drift. He drifted upward, passed lightly through the sturdy wood he had failed to break, drifted up through five feet of dark earth, and stood once more on the surface of the green land.
Free!
It was mid-afternoon. The sun glinted brightly, the sun Massey has thought never to see again. Fifty feet away, a group of people were gathered around a marble headstone, placing a wreath. Massey shouted to them.
“I’m free! They buried me, but I escaped from the grave! Get the sexton! Tell him there’s been a mistake, please!”
Curiously, they ignored him. They did not even turn around to see who called. Massey repeated his words, to no avail.
He took a deep breath—and discovered for the first time that he could not taste the springlike freshness of the air. He felt no cool fragrance in his nostrils.
Massey looked down. Then, suddenly, it was as if the ground parted beneath him, and he could see clearly the coffin lying deep in the earth, and he could see into the coffin, where the dead body of a middle-aged man lay—his fingers torn and bloodied, his face mottled with the discoloration of asphyxiation and the redness of a sudden and fatal heart attack.
At the End of Days
THE OLD MAN sat quietly at the edge of the hillside, watching the sun slowly drop behind the blunt purplish hills to the west. A cool night breeze drifted up from the distant river. He pulled his wrap closer around him; in these days, at his age, a chill was to be guarded against.
Not that it mattered very much, the old man thought wearily. A hundred forty years was long enough. He had no desire to live forever. Some of the young ones did; they went from rejuvenation to rejuvenation, fanning life back again and again into outworn bodies.
Not him. He had taken two treatments, one at fifty, the other at one hundred. In ten years, if he lasted that long, he would be eligible for a third treatment. But he would refuse it. He had come to the end of days, and Earth with him. By the grace of the Cosmos he would die tonight or tomorrow or next week, and they would put his ashes into the urn labelled Tomas Narin, 31116-31256, and that would be all.
Certainly a hundred forty years was enough, he thought, as the twilight colours stained the stubby mountains. He had lived long enough to see the twilight of man’s culture; he had no craving to watch the last feeble flicker. It was nearly thirty thousand years since Man had gone forth to the stars. Not a particularly long time, as cultures went; the Neanderthals had lasted three times as long.
But now it was over, nearly. The culture had lost its vitality, had gone past the self-regenerating stage. Some refused to admit that the end had come; others, like Narin, waited quietly for it.
In the distance a song was rising. The young people were amusing themselves. Narin smiled cynically at the phrase: the young people.
The young people were sixty and seventy years old. Fresh from their first rejuvenation, full of false life. They would be the last. No one bore children on Earth any more. The last child born was now close to fifty. Due for his first treatment soon, Narin thought.
Why have children? It was a dying civilization. No more than a few thousand still lived on Earth. The rest were gone, out there somewhere. Man was finished. Narin wondered what it had been like in the old days, when wonders sprouted new every day.
The wind whistled. Narin felt the chill, and decided that perhaps time had come for him to rise and go in. He would miss the rest of a lovely sunset, but that scarcely mattered. How many thousands of sunsets had he watched?
A sudden flash of light caught his eye, not far below the terrace. A brief golden glow, becoming brighter and brighter. Colours whirled in a vortex.
Then a boy stood there, looking uncertainly around.
Narin smiled. The boy was thin and wore only a gay cloth round his waist. His arms and skinny legs were deeply tanned. He looked to be no more than ten or eleven, though Narin had difficulty in judging a child’s age after so many years.
The old man said, “You’ll catch cold dressed like that, boy!”
Startled, the boy whirled, blinking in surprise. He caught sight of Narin on the terrace above him. “Oh—hello, old man. I won’t catch cold. I’m not staying long, you see.”
The boy’s intonation was strange, his vowel sounds oddly blurred. But still, Narin thought, they had understood each other perfectly.
“Come up here, boy. I want to talk to you.”
Spiderlike, the boy scampered up the hillside, vaulting agilely over the railing of Narin’s terrace. He landed deftly, feet-first, and saluted.
“Where are you from?” Narin asked.
“Rigel Six, sir. My name’s Jorid Dason. I’m eleven years old.”
Narin nodded. His guess had been accurate. “Tell me—how did you get here?”
“By quadrature, of course!”
“Quadrature?”
“Sure. You fix your co-ordinates and do the spin, and the overlapping brings you across. Don’t you know?”
“No,” Narin said. “I don’t. It brings you here immediately?”
“Of course.”
Narin had forgotten how far away Rigel was; but certainly it was a journey of many weeks, even by the fastest nullwarp ship. Yet the boy—unless he lied—had crossed space in a moment, a twinkling.
The boy said, “You mean you don’t know about quadrature on Earth? This is Earth, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Narin said. “This is Earth.”
The boy did a little dance. “Then there really is such a place! Wait till I tell them!”
“Who?”
“Rikki, Nuuri. My friends. They live on Deneb Nine. I was visiting them yesterday and they said there wasn’t any such place as Earth, that it was all made up like the other old legends. But this really is Earth.” For the first time the boy seemed to notice the chill. “It’s cold here. I’d better get back. ’Bye, mister.”
The boy skipped over the railing and danced away, down the brown and dry hillside. Halfway down he leaped into the air, and performed a complicated little wriggle, and was gone.
Narin shook his head slowly. A dream? An old man’s drowsy fantasy? No, he was not yet that far gone. It had been real. Out in the stars they had invented instantaneous transport, but nobody had bothered to tell Earth about it. Of course not; Earth was only a hazy half-legend.
Narin shrugged. His pessimistic mood lifted. He saw now that he had written Mankind off prematurely—that Earth’s last lingerers might be faded and forgotten, but that the race of man still thrived, tanned and energetic, on a thousand worlds. It was too bad the boy had left so soon. There were questions Narin wished he had asked. Well, perhaps he would come back some day, bringing his playmates along to show them that there really was such a place as Earth.
The wind had grown colder. Old Narin rose to go inside. The sun had set; the lulls were dark, and grey clouds hung in the blackening sky. But, bright as a billion candles, the stars were beginning to shine.
Warriors of Light
The Brotherhood provided men with a morality and a dream—and a threat of doom, tool
I
If Acolyte Third Level Christopher Mondschein had a weakness, it was that he wanted very badly to live forever. The yearning for everlasting life was a common enough human desire, and not really reprehensible. But Acolyte Mondschein carried it a little too far.
“After all,” one of his superiors found it necessary to remind him, “your function in the Brotherhood is to look after the wellbeing of others. Not to feather your own nest, Acolyte Mondschein. Do I make that clear?”
“Perfectly clear, Brother,” said Mondschein tautly. He felt ready to explode with shame, guilt and anger. “I see my error. I ask forgiveness.”
“It isn’t a matter of forgiveness, Acolyte Mondschein,” the older man replied. “It’s a matter of understanding. I don’t give a damn for forgiveness. What are your goals, Mondschein? What are you after?”
The Acolyte hesitated a moment before answering—both because it was always good policy to weigh one’s words before saying anything to a higher member of the Brotherhood, and because he knew he was on very thin ice. He tugged nervously at the pleats erf his robe and let his eyes wander through the Gothic magnificence of the chapel.
They stood on the balcony, looking down at the nave. No service was in progress, but a few worshippers occupied the pews anyway, kneeling before the blue radiance of the small cobalt reactor on the front dais. It was the Nyack chapel of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, third largest in the New York area, and Mondschein had joined it six months before, the day he turned twenty-two. He had hoped, at the time, that it was genuine religious feeling that had impelled him to pledge his fortunes to the Vorsters.
Now he was not so sure.
He grasped the balcony rail and said in a low voice, “I want to help people, Brother. People in general and people in particular. I want to help them find the way. And I want mankind to realize its larger goals. As Vorst says—”
“Spare me the scriptures, Mondschein.”
“I’m only trying to show you—”
“I know. Look, don’t you understand that you’ve got to move upward in orderly stages? You can’t go leapfrogging over your superiors, Mondschein, no matter how impatient you are to get to the top. Come into my office a moment.”
“Yes, Brother Langholt. Whatever you say.”
Mondschein followed the older man along the balcony and into the administrative wing of the chapel. The building was fairly new, and strikingly handsome—a far cry from the shabby slum-area storefronts of the first Vorster chapels, a quarter of a century before. Langholt touched a bony hand to the stud, and the door of his office irised quickly. They stepped through.
