Three Books of Known Space Page 8

  Ye gods! Had he shut off his radio? Yes, the switch was down.

  Move.

  The needle moved. It jerked once, infinitesimally, and was quiet.

  It was quiet a long time—seven or eight minutes. Then it jerked in the opposite direction. Alf was searching the wrong side of the hills!

  And then Carter saw the flaw in his own plan. Alf must now assume he was dead. And if he, Carter, was dead, then he wasn’t using air. Alf had two hours extra, but he thought he had four!

  The needle twitched and moved—a good distance. Carter sighed and closed his eyes. Alf was coming over. He had sensibly decided to search this side first; for if Carter was on this side, dead, then Alf would have to cross the range again to reach home.

  Twitch.

  Twitch. He must be at the top.

  Then the long, slow, steady movement down.

  Headlights. Very faint, to the north. Would Alf turn north?

  He turned south. Perfect. The headlights grew brighter…and Carter waited, with his buggy buried to the windshield in the sand at the base of the range.

  Alf still had the flare gun. Despite all his certainty that Carter was dead, he was probably riding with the gun in his hand. But he was using his headlights, and he was going slowly, perhaps fifteen miles per hour.

  He would pass…twenty yards west…

  Carter gripped the wrench. Here he comes.

  There was light in his eyes. Don’t see me. And then there wasn’t. Carter swarmed out of the buggy and down the sloping sand. The headlights moved away, and Carter was after them, leaping as a Moonie leaps, both feet pushing at once into the sand, a second spent in flying, legs straddled and feet reaching forward for the landing and another leap.

  One last enormous kangaroo jump—and he was on the O-tanks, falling on knees and forearms with feet lifted high so the metal wouldn’t clang. One arm landed on nothing at all where empty O-tanks were missing. His body tried to roll off onto the sand. He wouldn’t let it.

  The transparent bubble of Alf’s helmet was before him. The head inside swept back and forth, sweeping the triangle created by the headlights.

  Carter crept forward. He poised himself over Alf’s head, raised the wrench high, and brought it down with all his strength.

  Cracks starred out in the plastic. Alf looked up with his eyes and mouth all wide open, his amazement unalloyed by rage or terror. Carter brought the weight down again.

  There were more cracks, longer cracks. Alf winced and—finally—brought up the flare gun. Carter’s muscles froze for an instant as he looked into its hellish mouth. Then he struck for what he knew must be the last time.

  The wrench smashed through transparent plastic and scalp and skull. Carter knelt on the O-tanks for a moment, looking at the unpleasant thing he’d done. Then he lifted the body out by the shoulders, tumbled it over the side, and climbed into the cabin to stop the buggy.

  It took him a few minutes to find his own buggy where he’d buried it in the sand. It took longer to uncover it. That was all right. He had plenty of time. If he crossed the range by twelve-thirty he would reach bubbletown on the last of his air.

  There would be little room for finesse. On the other hand, he would be arriving an hour before dawn. They’d never see him. They would have stopped expecting him, or Alf, at noon tomorrow—even assuming they didn’t know Alf had refused to turn back.

  The bubble would be empty of air before anyone could get into a suit.

  Later he could repair and fill the bubble. In a month Earth would hear of the disaster: how a meteorite had touched down at a corner of the dome, how John Carter had been outside at the time, the only man in a suit. They’d take him home and he could spend the rest of his life trying to forget.

  He knew which tanks were his empties. Like every man in town, he had his own method of arranging them in the air bin. He dumped six and stopped. It was a shame to throw away empties. The tanks were too hard to replace.

  He didn’t know Alf’s arrangement scheme. He’d have to test Alf’s empties individually.

  Already Alf had thrown some away. (To leave space for Carter’s tanks?) One by one, Carter turned the valve of each tank. If it hissed, he put it in his own air bin. If it didn’t, he dropped it.

  One of them hissed. Just one.

  Five O-tanks. He couldn’t possibly make a thirty-hour trip on five O-tanks.

  Somewhere, Alf had left three O-tanks where he could find them again. Just on the off chance: just in case something went terribly wrong for Alf, and Carter captured his buggy, Carter still wouldn’t go home alive.

  Alf must have left the tanks where he could find them easily. He must have left them near here; for he had never been out of Carter’s sight until Carter crossed the range, and furthermore he’d kept just one tank to reach them. The tanks were nearby, and Carter had just two hours to find them.

  In fact, he realized, they must be on the other side of the range. Alf hadn’t stopped anywhere on this side.

  But he could have left them on the hillside during his jumps to the top…

  In a sudden frenzy of hurry, Carter jumped into his buggy and took it up. The headlights showed his progress to the top and over.

  The first red rays of sunlight found Lee Cousins and Rufe Doolittle already outside the bubble. They were digging a grave. Cousins dug in stoic silence. In a mixture of pity and disgust he endured Rufe’s constant compulsive flow of words.

  “…first man to be buried on another planet. Do you think Lew would have liked that? No, he’d hate it. He’d say it wasn’t worth dying for. He wanted to go home. He would have, too, on the next ship…”

  The sand came up in loose, dry shovelfuls. Practice was needed to keep it on the shovel. It tried to flow like a viscous liquid.

  “I tried to tell the Mayor he’d have liked a well burial. The Mayor wouldn’t listen. He said the Martians might not—hey!”

  Cousins’s eyes jerked up, and the movement caught them—a steadily moving fleck on the crater wall. Martian! was his first thought. What else could be moving out there? And then he saw that it was a buggy.

  To Lee Cousins it was like a corpse rising from its grave. The buggy moved like a blind thing down the tilted blocks of old glass, touched the drifted sand in the crater floor, all while he stood immobile. At the corner of his eye he saw Doolittle’s shovel flying wide as Doolittle ran for the bubble.

  The buggy only grazed the sand, then began reclimbing the crater. Cousins’s paralysis left him and he ran for the town’s remaining buggy.

  The ghost was moving at half speed. He caught it a mile beyond the crater rim. Carter was in the cockpit. His helmet was in his lap clutched in a rigid death-grip.

  Cousins reported. “He must have aimed the buggy along his direction finder when he felt his air going. Give him credit,” he added, and lifted a shovelful from the second grave. “He did that much. He sent back the buggy.”

  Just after dawn a small biped form came around a hill to the east. It walked directly to the sprawled body of Alf Harness, picked up a foot in both delicate-looking hands, and began to tug the corpse across the sand, looking rather like an ant tugging a heavy bread crumb. In the twenty minutes it needed to reach Alf’s buggy the figure never stopped to rest.

  Dropping its prize, the Martian climbed the pile of empty O-tanks and peered into the air bin, then down at the body. But there was no way such a small, weak being could lift such a mass.

  The Martian seemed to remember something. It scrambled down the O-tanks and crawled under the buggy’s belly.

  Minutes later it came out, dragging a length of nylon line. It tied each end of the line to one of Alf’s ankles, then dropped the loop over the buggy’s trailer-attachment knob.

  For a time the figure stood motionless above Alf s broken helmet, contemplating its work. Alf’s head might take a beating, riding that way; but as a specimen Alf’s head was useless. Wherever nitrogen dioxide gas had touched moisture, red fuming nitric acid had formed.
By now the rest of the body was dry and hard, fairly well preserved.

  The figure climbed into the buggy. A little fumbling, surprisingly little, and the buggy was rolling. Twenty yards away it stopped with a jerk. The Martian climbed out and walked back. It knelt beside the three O-tanks which had been tied beneath the buggy with the borrowed nylon line, and it opened the stopcocks of each in turn. It leapt back in horrified haste when the noxious gas began hissing out.

  Minutes later the buggy was moving south. The O-tanks hissed for a time, then were quiet.

  THE JIGSAW MAN

  Transplant technology, through two hundred years of development, had come into its own…and raised its own problems. The Belt escaped the most drastic social effects. Earth did not.

  LN

  In A.D. 1900, Karl Landsteiner classified human blood into four types: A, B, AB, and O, according to incompatibilities. For the first time it became possible to give a shock patient a transfusion with some hope that it wouldn’t kill him.

  The movement to abolish the death penalty was barely getting started, and already it was doomed.

  Vh83uOAGn7 was his telephone number and his driving license number and his social security number and the number of his draft card and his medical record. Two of these had been revoked, and the others had ceased to matter, except for his medical record. His name was Warren Lewis Knowles. He was going to die.

  The trial was a day away, but the verdict was no less certain for that. Lew was guilty. If anyone had doubted it, the prosecution had ironclad proof. By eighteen tomorrow Lew would be condemned to death. Broxton would appeal the case on some grounds or other. The appeal would be denied.

  The cell was comfortable, small, and padded. This was no slur on the prisoner’s sanity, though insanity was no longer an excuse for breaking the law. Three of the walls were mere bars. The fourth wall, the outside wall, was cement padded and painted a restful shade of green. But the bars which separated him from the corridor, and from the morose old man on his left, and from the big, moronic-looking teenager on his right—the bars were four inches thick and eight inches apart, padded in silicone plastics. For the fourth time that day Lew took a clenched fistful of the plastic and tried to rip it away. It felt like a sponge rubber pillow, with a rigid core the thickness of a pencil, and it wouldn’t rip. When he let go it snapped back to a perfect cylinder.

  “It’s not fair,” he said.

  The teenager didn’t move. For all of the ten hours Lew had been in his cell, the kid had been sitting on the edge of his bunk with his lank black hair falling in his eyes and his five o’clock shadow getting gradually darker. He moved his long, hairy arms only at mealtimes, and the rest of him not at all.

  The old man looked up at the sound of Lew’s voice. He spoke with bitter sarcasm. “You framed?”

  “No, I—”

  “At least you’re honest. What’d you do?”

  Lew told him. He couldn’t keep the hurt innocence out of his voice. The old man smiled derisively, nodding as if he’d expected just that.

  “Stupidity. Stupidity’s always been a capital crime. If you had to get yourself executed, why not for something important? See the kid on the other side of you?”

  “Sure,” Lew said without looking.

  “He’s an organlegger.”

  Lew felt the shock freezing in his face. He braced himself for another look into the next cell—and every nerve in his body jumped. The kid was looking at him. With his dull dark eyes barely visible under his mop of hair, he regarded Lew as a butcher might consider a badly aged side of beef.

  Lew edged closer to the bars between his cell and the old man’s. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “How many did he kill?”

  “None.”

  “?”

  “He was the snatch man. He’d find someone out alone at night, drug him and take him home to the doc that ran the ring. It was the doc that did all the killing. If Bernie’d brought home a dead donor, the doc would have skinned him down.”

  The old man sat with Lew almost directly behind him. He had twisted himself around to talk to Lew, but now he seemed to be losing interest. His hands, hidden from Lew by his bony back, were in constant nervous motion.

  “How many did he snatch?”

  “Four. Then he got caught. He’s not very bright, Bernie.”

  “What did you do to get put here?”

  The old man didn’t answer. He ignored Lew completely, his shoulders twitching as he moved his hands. Lew shrugged and dropped back in his bunk.

  It was nineteen o’clock of a Thursday night.

  The ring had included three snatch men. Bernie had not yet been tried. Another was dead; he had escaped over the edge of a pedwalk when he felt the mercy bullet enter his arm. The third was being wheeled into the hospital next door to the courthouse.

  Officially he was still alive. He had been sentenced; his appeal had been denied; but he was still alive as they moved him, drugged, into the operating room.

  The interns lifted him from the table and inserted a mouthpiece so he could breathe when they dropped him into freezing liquid. They lowered him without a splash, and as his body temperature went down they dribbled something else into his veins. About half a pint of it. His temperature dropped toward freezing, his heartbeats were further and further apart. Finally his heart stopped. But it could have been started again. Men had been reprieved at this point. Officially the organlegger was still alive.

  The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them. When the organlegger’s body temperature reached a certain point, the belt started. The first machine made a series of incisions in his chest. Skillfully and mechanically, the doctor performed a cardiectomy.

  The organlegger was officially dead.

  His heart went into storage immediately. His skin followed, most of it in one piece, all of it still living. The doctor took him apart with exquisite care, like disassembling a flexible, fragile, tremendously complex jigsaw puzzle. The brain was flashburned and the ashes saved for urn burial; but all the rest of the body, in slabs and small blobs and parchment-thin layers and lengths of tubing, went into storage in the hospital’s organ banks. Any one of these units could be packed in a travel case at a moment’s notice and flown to anywhere in the world in not much more than an hour. If the odds broke right, if the right people came down with the right diseases at the right time, the organlegger might save more lives than he had taken.

  Which was the whole point.

  Lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling television set, Lew suddenly began to shiver. He had not had the energy to put the sound plug in his ear, and the silent motion of the cartoon figures had suddenly become horrid. He turned the set off, and that didn’t help either.

  Bit by bit they would take him apart and store him away. He’d never seen an organ storage bank, but his uncle had owned a butcher-shop…

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  The kid’s eyes came up, the only living part of him. The old man twisted round to look over his shoulder. At the end of the hall the guard looked up once, then went back to reading.

  The fear was in Lew’s belly; it pounded in his throat. “How can you stand it?”

  The kid’s eyes dropped to the floor. The old man said, “Stand what?”

  “Don’t you know what they’re going to do to us?”

  “Not to me. They won’t take me apart like a hog.”

  Instantly Lew was at the bars. “Why not?”

  The old man’s voice had become very low. “Because there’s a bomb where my right thighbone used to be. I’m gonna blow myself up. What they find, they’ll never use.”

  The hope the old man had raised washed away, leaving bitterness. “Nuts. How could you put a bomb in your leg?”

  “Take the bone out, bore a hole lengthwise through it, build the bomb in the hole, get all the organic material out of the bone so it won’t rot, put the bone back in. ’Course your red corpuscle count goes down afterward. What I wa
nted to ask you. You want to join me?”

  “Join you?”

  “Hunch up against the bars. This thing’ll take care of both of us.”

  Lew had backed up against the opposite set of bars.

  “Your choice,” said the old man. “I never told you what I was here for, did I? I was the doc. Bernie made his snatches for me.”

  Lew felt the bars touch his shoulders and turned to find the kid looking dully into his eyes from two feet away. Organleggers! He was surrounded by professional killers!

  “I know what it’s like,” the old man continued. “They won’t do that to me. Well. If you’re sure you don’t want a clean death, go lie down behind your bunk. It’s thick enough.”

  The bunk was a mattress and a set of springs mounted into a cement block which was an integral part of the cement floor. Lew curled himself into fetal position with his hands over his eyes.

  He was sure he didn’t want to die now.

  Nothing happened.

  After a while he opened his eyes, took his hands away and looked around.

  The kid was looking at him. For the first time there was a sour grin plastered on his face. In the corridor the guard, who was always in a chair by the exit, was standing outside the bars looking down at him. He seemed concerned.

  Lew felt the flush rising in his neck and nose and ears. The old man had been playing with him. He moved to get up…

  And a hammer came down on the world.

  The guard lay broken against the bars of the cell across the corridor. The lank-haired youngster was picking himself up from behind his bunk, shaking his head. Somebody groaned; the groan rose to a scream. The air was full of cement dust.

  Lew got up.

  Blood lay like red oil on every surface that faced the explosion. Try as he might, and he didn’t try very hard, Lew could find no other trace of the old man.

  Except for the hole in the wall.

  He must have been standing…right…there.

  The hole would be big enough to crawl through, if Lew could reach it. But it was in the old man’s cell. The silicone plastic sheathing on the bars between the cells had been ripped away, leaving only pencil-thick lengths of metal.