IV
The Last Man
West stood silently at the bottom of the stairs. The room was too dark to see anything, but the voice was coming from somewhere near the table’s end, close to the lighted painting.
I may have to kill him, West was thinking, and I must know where he is. For the first shot has to do it, there’ll be no time for a second.
“Rosie had no mind,” the voice said out in the darkness. “That is, no mind to speak of. But she was telepathic. Her brain picked up thoughts and passed them on. And she could obey simple commands. Very simple commands. And killing a man is so simple, Mr. West.
“Rosie stood here beside me and I knew every word that you and Belden said. I did not blame you, West, for you had no way of knowing what you did. But I did blame Belden and I sent Rosie up to get him.
“There’s only one thing, West, that I hold against you. You should not have killed Rosie. That was a great mistake, West, a very great mistake.”
“It was no mistake,” said West. “I did it on purpose.”
“Take it easy, Mr. West,” said Cartwright. “Don’t do anything that might make me pull the trigger. Because I have a gun on you. Dead center on you, West, and I never miss.”
“I’ll give you odds,” said West, “that I can get you before you can pull the trigger.”
“Now, Mr. West,” said Cartwright, “let’s not get hotheaded about this. Sure, you pulled a fast one on us. You tried to muscle in and you almost sold us, although eventually we would have tripped you up. And I admire your guts. Maybe we can work it out so no one will get killed.”
“Start talking,” West told him.
“It was too bad about Rosie,” said Cartwright, “and I really hold that against you, West, for we could have used Rosie to good advantage. But after all, the work is started on the other planets and we still have Stella. Our students are well grounded … they can get along without instructions for a little while and maybe by the time we need to get in contact with them again we can find another one to replace our Rosie.”
“Quit wandering around,” said West. “Let’s hear what you have in mind.”
“Well,” said Cartwright, “we’re getting awfully short-handed. Belden’s dead and Darling’s dead and if Robertson isn’t dead by now he will be very shortly. For after he took Stella to Earth, he tried to desert, tried to run away. And that would never do, of course. He might tell folks about us and we can’t let anyone do that. For we are dead, you see. …”
He chuckled, the chuckle rolling through the darkness.
“It was a masterpiece, West, that broadcast. I was the last man alive and I told them what had happened. I told them the spacetime continuum had ruptured and things were coming through. And I gurgled … I gurgled just before I died.”
“You didn’t really die, of course,” West said, innocently.
“Hell, no. But they think I did. And they still wake up screaming, thinking how I must have died.”
Ham, thought West. Pure, unadulterated ham. A jokester who would maroon a man to die on a lonely moon. A man who held a gun in his fist while he bragged about the things he’d done … about how he had outwitted Earth.
“You see,” said Cartwright, “I had to make them believe that it really happened. I had to make it so horrible that the government would never make it public, so horrible they’d close the planet with an iron-tight ban.”
“You had to be alone,” said West.
“That’s right, West. We had to be alone.”
“Well,” said West. “You’ve almost got it now. There’s only two of you alive.”
“The two of us,” Cartwright said, “and you.”
“You forget, Cartwright,” said West. “You’re going to kill me. You’ve got a gun pointed at me and you’re all set to pull the trigger.”
“Not necessarily,” said Cartwright. “We might make a deal.”
I’ve got him now, thought West. I know exactly where he is. I can’t see him, but I know where he is. And the payoff is in a minute. It’ll be one of us or the other.
“You aren’t much use to us,” said Cartwright, “but we might need you later. You remember Langdon?”
“The one that got lost,” said West.
Cartwright chuckled. “That’s it, West. But he wasn’t lost. We gave him away. You see there was a—a—well, something, that could use him for a pet and so we made it a present of Langdon.”
He chuckled again. “Langdon didn’t like the idea too well, but what were we to do?”
“Cartwright,” West said, evenly, “I’m going for my gun.”
“What’s that—” said Cartwright, but the other words were blotted out by the hissing of his gun, firing even as he talked.
The beam hissed into the wall at the foot of the staircase, a spot that had been covered only a split second before by West’s head.
But West had dropped to a crouch almost as he spoke and now his own gun was in his fist, tilting up, solid in his hand. His thumb pressed the activator and then slid off.
Something dragged itself with heavy thumps across the floor and in the stillness between the bumps, West heard the rasp of heavy breaths.
“Damn you, West,” said Cartwright. “Damn you. …”
“It’s an old trick, Cartwright,” said West, “that business of talking to a man just before you kill him. Throwing him off guard, practically ambushing him.”
Came a sound of cloth dragging over cloth, the whistling of painful breath, the thump of knees and elbows on the floor.
Then there was silence.
And a moment later something in some far corner squeaked and ran on pattering, rat-sounding feet. Then the silence again.
The rat-feet were still, but there was another sound, a faint shout as if someone far away were shouting … from somewhere outside the building, from somewhere outside … from outside.
West crouched close against the floor, huddling there, the muzzle of the gun resting on the carpet.
Outside … outside … outside. …
The words hammered in his head.
Outside of what, he asked, but he knew the answer now. He knew where he had seen the picture of the thing that had slept in the chair and the other thing that squatted on the bedpost. And he knew the sound of chirping and of chittering and of running feet.
Outside … outside … outside. …
Outside this world, of course.
He raised his head and looked at the painting, and the tree still glowed softly with its inner light, and from within it came a sound, a faint thudding sound, the sound of running feet.
The shout came again and the man was running down the path inside the painting. A man who ran and waved his arms and shouted.
The man was Nevin.
Nevin was in the painting, running down the path, his padding feet raising little puffs of dust along the pebbled path.
West raised the pistol and his hand was trembling so that the muzzle weaved back and forth and then described a circle.
“Buck fever,” said West.
He said it through chattering teeth.
For now he knew … now he knew the answer.
He put up his other hand and grasped the wrist of the hand that held the gun and the muzzle steadied. West gritted his teeth together to stop their chattering.
His thumb went down against the activator and held it there and the flame from the gun’s muzzle spat out and mushroomed upon the painting. Mushroomed until the entire canvas was a maelstrom of blue brilliance that hissed and roared and licked with hungry tongues.
Slowly the tree ran together, as if one’s eyes might have blurred and gone slightly out of focus. The landscape dimmed and jigged and ran in little wavering lines. And through the wavering lines could be seen a twisted and distorted man whose mouth seemed open in a howl of rage. But there was no sound of howling, just the purring of the gun.
With a tired little puff the mushrooming brilliance and the painting were gone and the gun’s pencil of flame was hissing through an empty steel frame still filled with tiny glowing wires, spattering against the wall behind it.
West lifted his thumb and silence clamped down upon him, clamped down and held the room … as it held leagues of space stretching on all sides.
“No painting,” said West.
An echo seemed to run all around the room.
“No painting,” the echo said, but West knew it was no echo, just his brain clicking off endlessly the words his lips had said.
“No painting,” the echo said, but West was in some other world, some other place, some otherwhere. A machine that broke down the spacetime continuum or whatever it was that separated Man’s universe from other, stranger universes.
No wonder the fruit upon the tree had looked like the fruit upon the table. No wonder he had thought that he heard the wind in the leaves.
West stood up and moved to the wall behind him. He found a tumbler and thumbed it up and the lights came on.
In the light the smashed other-world machine was a sagging piece of wreckage. Cartwright’s body lay in the center of the room. A chittering thing ran across the floor and ducked into the dark beneath a table. A grinning face peeped out from behind a chair and squalled at West in cold-boned savagery.
And it was nothing new, for he had seen those faces before. Pictures of them in old books and in magazines that published tales of soul-shaking horror, tales of things that come from beyond, of entities that broke in from outside.
Just tales to send one shivering to bed. Just stories that should not be read at midnight. Stories that made one a little nervous when a tree squeaked in the wind outside the window or the rain walked along the shingles.
It had taken the wizardry of the Solar System’s best band of scientists to open the door that led into the world beyond.
And yet people in unknown, savage ages had talked of things like these … of goblin and incubus and imp. Perhaps men in Atlantis might have found the way, even as Nevin and Cartwright had found the way. In that long-gone day letting loose upon the world a flood of things that for ages after had lived in chimney-corner stories to chill one to the marrow.
And the pictures he had seen?
Ancestral memory, perhaps. Or a weird imaging that happened to be true. Or had the writers of those stories, the painters of those pictures. …
West shuddered from the thought.
What was it Cartwright had said? The work is started on the other planets.
The work of passing along the knowledge, the principles, the psychology of the alien things of otherwhere. Education by remote control … involuntary education. Stella, the telepathic Stella, singing back on Earth, darling of the airways. And she was an agent for these things … she passed along the knowledge and a man would think it was his own.
That was it, of course, the thing that Nevin and Cartwright had planned. Remake the world, they’d said. Sitting out on Pluto and pulling strings that would remake the world.
Superstitions once. Hard facts now. Stories once to make the blood run cold. And now—
With the source dried up, with the screen empty, with the Pluto gang wiped out, the cults would die and Stella would sing on, but there would come a time when the listeners would turn away from Stella, when her novelty wore off, when the strangeness and the alienness of her had lost their appeal.
The Solar System would go on thinking imp and incubus were no more than shuddery imagery from the days when men crouched in caves and saw a supernatural threat in every moving shadow.
But it had been a narrow squeak.
From a dark corner a thing mouthed at West in a shrill singsong of hate.
So this was it, thought West. Here he was, at the end of the Solar System’s trail, in an empty house. And it was, finally, as he had hoped it would be. No one around. A storehouse full of food. Adequate shelter. A shop where he could work. A place guarded by the patrol against unwelcome callers.
Just the place for a man who might be hiding. Just the place for a fugitive from the human race.
There were things to do … later on. Two bodies to be given burial. A screen to be cleaned up and thrown on a junk heap. A few chittering things to be hunted down and killed.
Then he could settle down.
There were robots, of course. One had brought in the dinner.
Later on, he said.
But there was something else to do … something to do immediately, if he could just remember.
He stood and looked around the room, cataloguing its contents.
Chairs, drapes, a desk, the table, the imitation fireplace. …
That was it, the fireplace.
He walked across the room to stand in front of it. Reaching up, he took down the bottle from the mantel, the bottle with the black silk bow tied around its neck. The bottle for the last man’s club.
And he was the last man, there was no doubt of it. The very last of all.
He had not been in the pact, of course, but he would carry out the pact. It was melodrama, undoubtedly, but there are times, he told himself, when a little melodrama may be excusable.
He uncorked the bottle and swung around to face the room. He raised the bottle in salute—salute to the gaping, blackened frame that had held the painting, to the dead man on the floor, to the thing that mewed in a far, dark corner.
He tried to think of a word to say, but couldn’t. And there had to be a word to say, there simply had to be.
“Mud in your eye,” he said and it wasn’t any good, but it would have to do.
He put the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and tilted back his head.
Gagging, he snatched the bottle from his lips.
It wasn’t whisky and it was awful. It was gall and vinegar and quinine, all rolled into one. It was a brew straight from the Pit. It was all the bad medicine he had taken as a boy, it was sulphur and molasses, it was castor oil, it was—
“Good God,” said Frederick West.
For suddenly he remembered the location of a knife he had lost twenty years before. He saw it where he had left it, just as plain as day.
He knew an equation he’d never known before, and what was more, he knew what it was for and how it could be used.
Unbidden, he visualized, in one comprehensive picture, just how a rocket motor worked … every detail, every piece, every control, like a chart laid out before his eyes.
He could capture and hold seven fence posts in his mental eye and four was the best any human ever had been able to see mentally before.
He whooshed out his breath to air his mouth and stared at the bottle.
Suddenly he was able to recite, word for word, the first page from a book he had read ten years ago.
“The hormones,” he whispered. “Darling’s hormones!”
Hormones that did something to his brain. Speeded it up, made it work better, made more of it work than had ever worked before. Made it think cleaner and clearer than it had ever thought before.
“Good Lord,” he said.
A head start to begin with. And now this!
The man who has it could rule the Solar System. That was what Belden had said about it.
Belden had hunted for it. Had torn this place apart. And Darling had hunted for it, too. Darling, who had thought he had it, who had played a trick on Nevin and Cartwright so he could be sure he had it, who had drank himself to death trying to find the bottle he had it in.
And all these years the hormones had been in this bottle on the mantel!
Someone else had played a trick on all of them. Langdon, maybe. Langdon, who had been given away as a pet to a thing so monstrous that even Cartwright had shrunk from naming it.
With shaking hand, West put the bottle back on the mantel, placed the cork beside it. For a moment he stood there, hands against the mantel, gripping it, staring out the vision port beside the fireplace. Staring down into the valley where a shadowy cylinder tilted upward from the rocky planet, as if striving for the stars.
The Alpha Centauri—the ship with the space drive that wouldn’t work. Something wrong … something wrong. …
A sob rose in West’s throat and his hands tightened on the mantel with a grip that hurt.
He knew what was wrong!
He had studied blueprints of the drive back on Earth.
And now it was as if the blueprints were before his eyes again, for he remembered them, each line, each symbol as if they were etched upon his brain.
He saw the trouble, the simple adjustment that would make the space drive work. Ten minutes … ten minutes would be all he needed. So simple. So simple. So simple that it seemed beyond belief it had not been found before, that all the great minds which had worked upon it should not have seen it long ago.
There had been a dream—a thing that he had not even dared to say aloud, not even to himself. A thing he had not dared even to think about.
West straightened from the mantel and faced the room again. He took the bottle and for a second time raised it in salute.
But this time he had a toast for the dead men and the thing that whimpered in the corner.
“To the stars,” he said.
And he drank without gagging.