The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (5 page)

Masters’ teeth chattered in the cold.

Tony edged his way around the ship, looking the damage over. He was gratified to discover that although the auxiliary rocket jets were twisted and broken, the only hole was in the storage bin bulkheads. That could be repaired, and so, in time, could the jets.

They started to enter the ship when Masters grasped his arm. He pointed up into the sky, where a rift in the clouds showed.

Tony nodded slowly. Offsetting murkily twinkling stars, there was another celestial body, visible as a tiny crescent.

“A planet?” muttered Tony.

“Must be.” Masters’ voice was low.

They stared at it for a moment, caught up in the ominous, baleful glow. Then Tony shook himself out of it, went for the storage bin.

Walking down the corridor with Masters, Tony came upon Braker and Yates.

Braker grinned at him, but his eyes were ominous.

“What’s this I hear about about a skeleton?”

Tony bit his lip. “Where’d you hear it?”

“From the girl and her old man. We stopped outside their room a bit. Well, it didn’t make sense, the things they were saying. Something about an emerald ring and a skeleton and a cave.” He took one step forward, an ugly light in his smoky eyes. “Come clean, Crow. How does this ring I’ve got on my finger tie with a skeleton?”

Tony said coldly, “You’re out of your head. Get back to the lounge.”

Braker sneered. “Why? You can’t make us stay there with the door broken down.”

Masters made an impatient sound. “Oh, let them go, lieutenant. We can’t bother ourselves about something as unimportant as this. Anyway, we’re going to need these men for fixing up the ship.”

Tony said to Yates, “You know anything about electricity? Seems to me you had an E.E. once.”

Yates’ thin face lighted, before he remembered his sullen pose. “O.K., you’re right,’ he muttered. He looked at Braker interrogatively.

Braker said “Sorry. We’re not obligated to work for you. As prisoners, you’re responsible for us and our welfare. We’ll help you or whoever’s bossing the job
if
we’re not prisoners.”

Tony nodded. “Fair enough. But tonight, you stay prisoners. Tomorrow, maybe not,” and he herded them back into the lounge. He cuffed them to the guide rail and so left them, frowning a little. Braker had been too acquiescent

The reason for that struck Tony hard. Walking back along the corridor, he saw something gleaming on the floor. He froze. Revulsion gripping him, he slowly picked up the ring.

Masters turned, said sharply, “What’s up?”

Tony smiled lopsidedly, threw the ring into the air twice, speculatively, catching it in his palm. He extended it to Masters.

“Want a ring?”

Masters’ face went white as death. He jumped back.

“Damn you!” he said violently. “Take that thing away!”

“Braker slipped it off his finger,” said Tony, his voice edging into the aching silence. Then he turned on his heel, and walked back to the lounge. He caught Braker’s attention.

He held the ring out.

“You must have dropped it,” he said.

Braker’s lips opened in a mirthful, raucous laugh.

“You can have it, copper,” he gasped. “
I
don’t want to be any damned skeleton!”

Tony slipped the ring into his pocket and walked back down to the corridor with a reckless swing to his body.

He knocked on the door to Overland’s room, opened it when Laurette’s voice sounded.

Masters and Laurette looked at him strangely.

Overland looked up from the bed.

“Lieutenant,” he said, an almost ashamed look on his face, “sometimes I wonder about the human mind. Masters seems to think that now
you’ve
got the ring,
you’re
going to be the skeleton.”

Masters’ nails clicked. “It’s true, isn’t it? The outlaws know about the ring. We know about it. But Crow
has
the ring, and it’s certain none of us is going to take it.”

Overland made an exasperated clicking sound.

“It’s infantile,” he snapped. “Masters, you’re acting like a child, not like a scientist. There’s only one certainty, that one of us is going to be the skeleton. But there’s no certainty which one. And there’s even a possibility that all of us will die.” His face clouded angrily. “And the most infantile viewpoint possible seems to be shared by all of you. You’ve grown superstitious about the ring. Now it’s – a ring of death! Death to him who wears the ring!
Pah!
”

He stretched forth an imperative hand.

“Give it to me, lieutenant! I’ll tell you right now that no subterfuge in the universe will change the fact of my being a skeleton if I
am
the skeleton; and vice versa.”

Tony shook his head. “I’ll be keeping it – for a while. And you might as well know that no scientific argument will convince anybody the ring is not a ring of death. For, you see, it is.”

Overland sank back, lips pursed. “What are you going to do with it?” he charged. When Tony didn’t answer, he said pettishly, “Oh, what’s the use! On the face of it, the whole situation’s impossible.” Then his face lighted. “What did you find out?”

Tony briefly sketched his conclusions. It would be two or three weeks before they could repair the rocket jets, get the electric transmission system working properly.

Overland nodded absently. “Strange, isn’t it!” he mused. “All that work DeTosque, Bodley, Morrell, Haley, the Farr brothers and myself have done goes for nothing. Our being here proves the theory they were working on.”

Laurette smiled lopsidedly at Tony.

“Lieutenant,” she said, “maybe the skeleton was a woman.”

“A woman!” Masters’ head snapped around, horror on his face. “Not you, Laurette!”

“Why not? Women have skeletons, too – or didn’t you know?” She kept her eyes on Tony. “Well, lieutenant? I put a question up to you.”

Tony kept his face impassive. “The skeleton,” he said, without a tremor, “was that of a man.”

“Then,” said Laurette Overland, stretching out her palm, cupshaped, “give me the ring.”

Tony froze, staring. That his lie should have this repercussion was unbelievable. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Overland’s slowly blanching face. On Masters, Laurette’s statement had the most effect.

“Damn you, Crow!” he said thickly. “This is just a scheme of yours to get rid of the ring!” He lunged forward.

The action was unexpected. Tony fell backward under the impact of the man’s fist. He sprawled on his back. Masters threw himself at him.

“Erle, you utter fool!” That was Laurette’s wail.

Disgust settled on Tony’s face. He heaved, by sheer muscular effort, and threw Masters over his back. His fist came down with a brief but pungent
crack
. Masters slumped, abruptly lifeless.

Tony drew himself to his feet, panting. Laurette was on her knees beside Masters, but her dismayed eyes were turned upward to Tony.

“I’m sorry, lieutenant!” she blurted.

“What have you got to be sorry about?” he snapped. “Except for being in love with a fool like that one.”

He was sorry for it the second he said it. He didn’t try to read Laurette’s expression, but turned sullen eyes to Overland.

“It’s night,” he said abruptly, “and it’s raining. Tomorrow, when the sun comes up, it’ll probably be different. We can figure out the situation then, and start our plans for—” He let the sentence dangle. Plans for what? He concluded, “I suggest we all get some sleep,” and left.

He arranged some blankets on the floor of the control room, and instantly went to sleep, though there were times when he stirred violently. The skeleton was in his dreams—

There were five of them at the breakfast table. Laurette serving; Masters beside her, keeping his eyes sullenly on the food; Braker, eating as heartily as his cuffed hands would allow; Yates, picking at his food with disinterest.

Tony finished his second cup of coffee, and scraped his chair back.

“I’ll be taking a look around,” he told Laurette in explanation. He turned to the door.

Braker leaned back in his chair until it was balanced on two legs, and grinned widely.

“Where you going, Mr. Skeleton?”

Tony froze.

“After a while, Braker,” he said, eyes frigid, “the ring will be taken care of.”

Yates’ fork came down. “If you mean you’re going to try to get rid of it, you know you can’t do it. It’ll come back.” His eyes were challenging.

Masters looked up, a strange milling series of thoughts in his sullen eyes. Then he returned to his food.

Tony, wondering what that expression had meant, shrugged and left the room; and shortly the ship, by way of the cavity in the storage bin.

He wandered away from the ship, walking slowly, abstractedly, allowing impressions to slip his mind without conscious resistance. There was a haunting familiarity in this tumbled plain, though life had no place in the remembrance. There was some animal life, creatures stirring in the dark humus, in long, thick grass, in gnarled tree tops. This was mountain country and off there was a tumbling mountain stream.

He impelled himself toward it, the tiny, yet phenomenally bright sun throwing a shadow that was only a few inches long. It was high “noon.”

He stood on the brink of the rocky gorge, spray prismatically alive with color, dashing up into his face. His eyes followed the stream up to the mountain fault where water poured downward to crush at the rocks with the steady, pummeling blow of a giant. He stood there, lost in abstraction, other sounds drowned out.

All except the grate of a shoe behind him. He tried to whirl; too late! Hands pushed against his back – in the next second, he had tumbled off the brink of the chasm, clutching wildly, vainly, at thick spray. Then, an awful moment of freezing cold, and the waters had enclosed him. He was borne away, choking for air, frantically flailing with his arms.

He was swept to the surface, caught a chaotic glimpse of sun and clouded sky and rock, and then went under again, with a half lungful of air. He tensed, striving to sweep away engulfing panic. A measure of reason came back. Hands and feet began to work in purposeful unison. The surface broke around him. He stayed on top. But that was only because the stream was flowing darkly, swiftly, evenly. He was powerless to force himself against this current.

He twisted, savagely looking for some sign of release. A scaly, oily tree limb came at him with a rush. One wild grab, and the limb was bending downstream, straining against the pressure his body was exerting. He dashed hair from his eyes with one trembling hand, winced as he saw the needle-bed of rapids a hundred feet downstream. If that limb hadn’t been there—His mind shuddered away from the thought.

Weakly, he drew himself hand over hand upward, until the tree trunk was solidly below him. He dropped to the ground, and lay there, panting. Then he remembered the hands on his back. With a vicious motion, he jerked out his key ring. That was the answer – the key to the cuffs was gone, taken during the night, of course! Erle Masters, then, had pulled this prize play, or perhaps one of the outlaws, after Masters released him.

After a while, he came to his feet, took stock of his surroundings. Off to his left, a cliff side, and scarcely a half-mile distant, the pathetically awry hulk of the ship, on the top of the slope that stretched away.

The cliff side came into his vision again. A fault in the escarpment touched a hidden spot in his memory. He involuntarily started toward it. But he slowed up before he got to the fault – which was really a cave that tapered out to nothingness as its sides rose.

The cave!

And this sloping plain, these mountains, composed the surface of Asteroid 1007, millions of years from now.

Tony dropped emotionlessly to his knees at the mouth of the cave. Not so long ago, he had done the same thing. Then there had been a complete, undisjointed skeleton lying there. Somehow, then, he had known the skeleton existed before the human race – as if it were someone – the skeleton? – that had spoken to him across the unutterable years. The skeleton? That could not be! Yet, whence had come the memory?

He took the ring from his pocket and put it on his finger. It gleamed.

He knelt there for minutes, like a man who worships at his own grave, and he was not dead. Not dead! He took the ring from his finger, then, a cold, bleak smile growing on his face.

He came to his feet, a rising wind whipping at his hair. He took a half dozen running steps toward the river, brought his arm over his shoulder in a throwing gesture.

Somehow the ring slipped from his fingers and fell.

He stooped, picked it up. This time, he made it leave his hand. It spun away, twinkling in the faint sunlight. But the gravity had hold of it, and it fell on the brink of the river, plainly visible.

A dry, all-gone feeling rose in Tony’s throat. Grimly, he went forward, picked it up again. Keeping his eyes on it, he advanced to the brink of the river gorge. He held the ring over the darkly swirling waters, slowly released it.