IV.
It was but ten miles to the little town of Science Port. He made it by dawn, walking. But even this was not good. At four in the morning a silver beetle pulled up on the road beside him.
"h.e.l.lo," called the man inside.
"h.e.l.lo," said Lantry wearily.
"Why are you walking?" asked the man.
"I"m going to Science Port.""Why don"t you ride?"
"I like to walk."
"n.o.body likes to walk. Are you sick? May I give you a ride?"
"Thanks, but I like to walk."
The man hesitated, then closed the beetle door. "Good night."
When the beetle was gone over the hill, Lantry retreated into a nearby forest. A world full of bungling helping people. By G.o.d, you couldn"t even walk without being accused of sickness. That meant only one thing. He must not walk any longer, he had to ride. He should have accepted that fellow"s offer.
The rest of the night he walked far enough off the highway so that if a beetle rushed by he had time to vanish in the underbrush. At dawn he crept into an empty dry water-drain and closed his eyes.
The dream was as perfect as a rimed snowflake.
He saw the graveyard where he had lain deep and ripe over the centuries. He heard the early morning footsteps of the labourers returning to finish their work.
"Would you mind pa.s.sing me the shovel, Jim?"
"Here you go."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute."
"What"s up?"
"Look here. We didn"t finish last night, did we?"
"No."
"There was one more coffin, wasn"t there?"
"Yes."
"Well, here it is, and open."
"You"ve got the wrong hole."
"What"s the name say on the gravestone?"
"Lantry. William Lantry."
"That"s him, that"s the one! Gone!"
"What could have happened to it?"
"How do I know. The body was here last night."
"We can"t be sure, we didn"t look."
"G.o.d, man, people don"t bury empty coffins. He was in his box. Now he isn"t."
"Maybe this box was empty."
"Nonsense. Smell that smell? He was here all right."A pause.
"n.o.body would have taken the body, would they?"
"What for?"
"A curiosity, perhaps."
"Don"t be ridiculous. People just don"t steal. n.o.body steals."
"Well, then, there"s only one solution."
"And?"
"He got up and walked away."
A pause. In the dark dream, Lantry expected to hear laughter. There was none.
Instead, the voice of the gravedigger, after a thoughtful pause, said, "Yes. That"s it, indeed. He got up and walked away."
"That"s interesting to think about," said the other.
"Isn"t it, though?
Silence.
Lantry awoke. It had all been a dream, but G.o.d, how realistic. How strangely the two men had carried on. But not unnaturally, on, no. That was exactly how you expected men of the future to talk. Men of the future. Lantry grinned wryly. That was an anachronism for you. This was the future. This was happening now. It wasn"t 300 years from now, it was now, not then, or any other time. This wasn"t the Twentieth Century. Oh, how calmly those two men in the dream had said, "He got up and walked away." "-interesting to think about." "Isn"t it, though?" With never a quaver in their voices. With not so much as a glance over their shoulders or a tremble of spade in hand. But, of course, with their perfectly honest, logical minds, there was but one explanation; certainly n.o.body had stolen the corpse. "n.o.body steals." The corpse had simply got up and walked off. The corpse was the only one who could have possibly moved the corpse. By the few casual slow words of the gravediggers Lantry knew what they were thinking. Here was a man that had lain in suspended animation, not really dead, for hundreds of years. The jarring about, the activity, had brought him back.
Everyone had heard of those little green toads that are sealed for centuries inside mud rocks or in ice patties, alive, alive oh! And how when scientists chipped them out and warmed them like marbles in their hands the little toads leapt about and frisked and blinked. Then it was only logical that the gravediggers think of William Lantry in like fashion.
But what if the various parts were fitted together in the next day or so? If the vanished body and the shattered, exploded Incinerator were connected? What if this fellow named Burke, who had returned pale from Mars, went to the library again and said to the young woman he wanted some books and she said, "On, your friend Lantry was in the other day." And he"d say, "Lantry who? Don"t know anyone bythat name." And she"d say, "Oh, he lied." And people in this time didn"t lie. So it would all form and coalesce, item by item, bit by bit. A pale man who was pale and shouldn"t be pale had lied and people don"t lie, and a walking man on a lonely country road had walked and people don"t walk anymore, and a body was missing from a cemetery, and the Incinerator had blown up and and- They would come after him. They would find him. He would be easy to find. He walked. He lied. He was pale. They would find him and take him and stick him through the open fire lock of the nearest burner and that would be your Mr. William Lantry, like a Fourth of July set-piece!
There was only one thing to be done efficiently and completely. He arose in violent moves. His lips were wide and his dark eyes were flared and there was a trembling and burning all through him. He must kill and kill and kill and kill and kill.
He must make his enemies into friends, into people like himself who walked but shouldn"t walk, who were pale in a land of pinks. He must kill and then kill and then kill again. He must make bodies and dead people and corpses. He must destroy Incinerator after flue after burner after Incinerator. Explosion on explosion. Death on death. Then, when the Incinerators were all thrown in ruin, and the hastily established morgues were jammed with the bodies of people shattered by the explosion, then he would begin to make friends, his enrolment of the dead in his own cause.
Before they traced and found and killed him, they must be killed themselves. So far he was safe. He could kill and they would not kill back. People simply do not go around killing. That was his safety margin. He climbed out of the abandoned drain, stood in the road.
He took the knife from his pocket and hailed the next beetle.
It was like the Fourth of July! The biggest d.a.m.ned firecracker of them all. The Science Port Incinerator split down the middle and flew apart. It made a thousand small explosions that ended with a greater one. It fell upon the town and crushed houses and burned trees. It woke people from sleep and then put them to sleep again, forever, an instant later.
William Lantry, sitting in a beetle that was not his own, tuned idly to a station on the audio dial. The collapse of the Incinerator had killed some four hundred people.
Many had been caught in flattened houses, others struck by flying metal. A temporary morgue was being set up at- An address was given.
Lantry noted it with a pad and pencil.
He could go on this way, he thought, from town to town, from country to country, destroying the burners, the Pillars of Fire, until the whole clean magnificent framework of flame and cauterization was tumbled. He made a fair estimate-each explosion averaged five hundred dead. You could work up to a hundred thousand in no time.He pressed the floor stud of the beetle. Smiling, he drove off through the dark streets of the city.
The city coroner had requisitioned an old warehouse. From midnight until four in the morning the grey beetles hissed down the rain-shiny streets, turned in, and the bodies were laid out on the cold concrete floors, with white sheets over them. It was a continuous flow until about four-thirty; then it stopped. There were about two hundred bodies there, white and cold.
The bodies were left alone; n.o.body stayed behind to tend them. There was no use tending the dead; it was a useless procedure; the dead could take care of themselves.
About five o"clock, with a touch of dawn in the east, the first trickle of relatives arrived to identify their sons or their fathers or their mothers or their uncles. The people moved quickly into the warehouse, made the identification, moved quickly out again. By six o"clock, with the sky still lighter in the east, this trickle had pa.s.sed on, also.
William Lantry walked across the wide wet street and entered the warehouse.
He held a piece of blue chalk in one hand.
He walked by the coroner who stood in the entranceway talking to two others "...
drive the bodies to the Incinerator in Mellin Town, tomorrow..." The voices faded.
Lantry moved, his feet echoing faintly on the cool concrete. A wave of sourceless relief came to him as he walked among the shrouded figures. He was among his own. And-better than that, by G.o.d! he had created these! He had made them dead! He had procured for himself a vast number of rec.u.mbent friends!
Was the coroner watching? Lantry turned his head. No. The warehouse was calm and quiet and shadowed in the dark morning. The coroner was walking away now, across the street, with his two attendants, a beetle had drawn up on the other side of the street, and the coroner was going over to talk with whomever was in the beetle.
William Lantry stood and made a blue chalk pentagram on the floor by each of the bodies. He moved swiftly, swiftly, without a sound, without blinking. In a few minutes, glancing up now and then to see if the coroner was still busy, he had chalked the floor by a hundred bodies. He straightened up and put the chalk in his pocket.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time...
Lying in the earth, over the centuries, the processes and thoughts of pa.s.sing peoples and pa.s.sing times had seeped down to him, slowly, as into a deep-buried sponge. From some death-memory in him now, ironically, repeatedly, a black typewriter clacked out black even lines of pertinent words: Now is the time for all good men, for all good men, to come to the aid of-William Lantry.
other words- Arise my love, and come away- The quick brown fox jumped over... Paraphrase it. The quick risen body jumped over the tumbled Incinerator...
Lazarus, come forth from the tomb...
He knew the right words. He need only speak them as they had been spoken over the centuries. He need only gesture with his hands and speak the words, the dark words that would cause these bodies to quiver, rise and walk!
And when they had risen he would take them through the town, they would kill others and the others would rise and walk. By the end of the day there would be thousands of good friends walking with him. And what of the naive, living people of this year, this day, this hour? They would be completely unprepared for it. They would go down to defeat because they would not be expecting war of any sort.
They wouldn"t believe it possible, it would all be over before they could convince themselves that such an illogical thing could happen.
He lifted his hands. His lips moved. He said the words. He began in a chanting whisper and then raised his voice, louder. He said the words again and again and again. His eyes were closed tightly. His body swayed. He spoke faster and faster. He began to move forward among the bodies. The dark words flowed from his mouth.
He was enchanted with his own formulae. He stooped and made further blue symbols on the concrete, in the fashion of long-dead sorcerers, smiling, confident.
Any moment now the first tremor of the still bodies, any moment now the rising, the leaping up of the cold ones!
His hands lifted in the air. His head nodded. He spoke, he spoke, he spoke. He gestured. He talked loudly over the bodies, his eyes flaring, his body tensed. "Now!"
he cried violently. "Rise, all of you!"
Nothing happened.
"Rise!" he screamed, with a terrible torment in his voice.
The sheets lay in white blue-shadow folds over the silent bodies.
"Hear me, and act!" he shouted.
Far away, on the street, a beetle hissed along.
Again, again, again he shouted, pleaded. He got down by each body and asked of it his particular violent favour. No reply. He strode wildly between the even white rows, flinging his arms up, stooping again and again to make blue symbols!
Lantry was very pale. He licked his lips. "Come on, get up," he said. "They have, they always have, for a thousand years. When you make a mark-so! and speak a word-so! they always rise! Why not you now, why not you! Come on, come on, before they come back!"The warehouse went up into shadow. There were steel beams across and down.
In it, under the roof, there was not a sound, except the raving of a lonely man.
Lantry stopped.
Through the wide doors of the warehouse he caught a glimpse of the last cold star of morning.
This was the year 2349.
His eyes grew cold and his hands fell to his sides. He did not move.
Once upon a time people shuddered when they heard the wind about the house, once people raised crucifixes and wolfbane, and believed in walking dead and bats and loping white wolves. And as long as they believed, then so long did the dead, the bats, the loping wolves exist. The mind gave birth and reality to them.
But...
He looked at the white-sheeted bodies.
These people did not believe.