Authors: Ray Bradbury
Tags: #convoy ship, #cruiser, #asteroids, #traitor, #battle, #soldiers, #fear, #hate, #children, #underwater, #death of Earth, #frame-up, #space travel, #asteroid belt, #asteroid computator, #defense mechanism, #Martian territory, #killer, #game, #bravery, #loneliness, #shock, #monsters, #Jupiter, #friendship, #time travel, #pirates, #witchcraft, #ancient predators, #Mars, #curse, #coroner, #scientists, #torpedo, #guns, #undead, #superstition, #suicide, #innocence, #resurrection, #celebration, #redemption, #violence, #hypnosis, #Moon base, #guardians, #past life, #love, #family, #aliens, #son, #killing candle, #escape from reality, #navigator, #trust, #ultimate sacrifice, #Martians, #telephone calls, #jealousy, #submarine, #time machine, #war, #murder, #rocket ships, #Martian well, #clairvoyant, #coward, #conspiracy, #guilt, #lover, #weapon, #ocean creatures, #Moon worship, #alcoholic, #mermaids, #death, #morgue spaceship, #despair, #joblessness, #night ritual, #betrayal, #insanity, #vengeance, #night creatures, #prisoner, #magic typewriter, #dimensional travel, #jungle, #time, #Earth, #greed
“So you kill millions of men, for that.”
“What’d they do for me? Ruined my guts in the last war!”
There had to be some argument, something to say, quick, something to do to a man like Logan. Brandon thought, quickly. “Look, Logan, we can work this, but save the body.”
“Don’t be funny.”
“Put one of the
other
bodies in the ship we send out. Save Lazarus’ body and run hack to Earth with it!” insisted Brandon.
The little assistant shook his head. “The Martians’ll have an intra-material beam focused on the emergency ship when they get within one hundred thousand miles of her. They’ll be able to tell then if the Body’s dead or alive. No dice, Brandy.”
It was hardly like leaping himself, thought Brandon. It was just frustration and rage and unthinking action. Brandon jumped. Logan hardly flicked an eyelid as he pressed the trigger of his paragun. It paralyzed the legs from under Brandon and he collapsed. The gun sprayed over his groin and chest and face, too, in a withering shower of red-hot needles. The lights went out.
* * * *
There was a loose sensation of empty space, and acceleration minus power. Pure soundless momentum. Brandon forced his eyes open painfully, and found himself alone in the preparations’ room, lying stretched upon one of the coroner tables, bound with metal fibre.
“Logan!” he bellowed it up through the ship. He waited. He did it again. “Logan!”
He fought the metal fibre, knotting his fists, twisting his arms. He yanked himself back and forth. It pretty well held, except for a looseness in the right hand binding. He worked on that. Upstairs, a queer, detached Martian bass voice intoned itself.
“500,000 miles. Prepare your emergency craft with the body of the Scientist inside of it, Morgue Ship. At 300,000 miles, release the emergency craft. We’ll release
our
mineral payment ship now, giving you a half hour leeway to pick it up. It contains the exact amount you asked for.”
Logan’s voice next:
“Good. The Scientist is alive, still, and doing well. You’re getting a bargain.”
Brandon’s face whitened, bringing out all the hard, scared bones of it, the cheeks and brow and chin bones. He jerked against the binding and it only jumped the air from his lungs so he sobbed. Breathing deeply, he lay back. They were taking his child back out into space. Lazarus, his second son, whom he had birthed out of space with a metal retriever, they were taking back out and away from him. You can’t have your real son; so you take the second best and you slap him into breathing life, into breathing consciousness, and before he is a day old they try to tear him away from you again. Brandon fairly yelled against his manacles of wire. Sweat came down his face, and the stuff from his eyes wasn’t all sweat.
Logan tiptoed down the hard rungs, grinning.
“Awake, Sleeping Beauty?”
Brandon said nothing. His right hand was loosened. It was wet and loosened, working like a small white animal at his side, slipping from its wire trap.
“You can’t go ahead with it, Logan.”
“Why not?”
“The Earth Tribunal will find out.”
“You won’t tell them.” Logan was doing something across the room. He was the only moving thing in front of a hundred cold shelves of sleeping warriors.
Brandon gasped, tried to get up, fell back. “How’ll you fake my death?”
“With an injection of sulfacardium. Heart failure. Too much pulse on a too old heart. Simple.” Logan turned and there was a hypodermic in his hand.
Brandon lay there. The ship went on and on. The body was upstairs, lying breathing in its metal cradle, mothered by him and jerked to life by him, and now going away. Brandon managed to say:
“Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Give me the drug now. I don’t want to be awake when you send Lazarus out. I don’t want that.”
“Sure.” Logan came walking across the deck, raising the hypodermic. It glittered hard and silver fine, and sharp.
“One more thing, Logan.”
“Hurry it up!”
Only one arm free, one leg able to move slightly. Logan was pressing against the table, now. The hypodermic hesitated in his fingers.
“This!” said Brandon.
* * * *
With one foot, Brandon kicked the teeter-tauter control at the base of the board. The board, whining, began to elevate swiftly. With his free arm, instantly pulling the last way free from the wire, Brandon clutched Logan’s screaming head and jammed it down under the table, under the descending board. Board and metal base ground together and kept on going three inches. Logan screamed only once. The sounds after that were so horrible that Brandon retched. Logan’s body slumped and hung, arms slack, hypo dropped and shattered on the deck.
The whole table kept going up and down, up and down.
It made Brandon sicker with each movement. The whole room revolved, tipped, spun sickishly. The corpses in all their niches seemed to shiver with it.
He managed to kick the control to neutral and the table poised, elevated at the heels, so blood pounded hotly into Brandon’s pale face, lighting, coloring it. His heart was pounding furiously and the chronometer upon the hull-wall clicked out time passing, time passing and miles with it, and Martians coming so much the closer….
He fought the remaining wires continuously, cursing, bringing threads and beads of blood from raw wrist, ankle and hips. Red lights buzzed like insects on the ceiling, spelling out:
“ROCKET COMING…UN-KNOWN CRAFT…ROCKET APPROACHING….”
Hold on, Lazarus. Don’t let them wake you all the way up. Don’t let them take you. Better for you to go on slumbering forever.
The wire on his left wrist sprang open. It took another five minutes to bleed himself out of the ankle wires. The ship spun on, all too quickly.
Not looking at Logan’s body, Brandon sprang from the table and with an infinite weariness tried to speed himself up the rungs. His mind raced ahead, but his body could only sludge rung after rung upward into the radio room. The door to the emergency rocket boat was wide and inside, living quietly, cheeks pink, pulse beating softly in throat, Lazarus lay unthinking, unknowing that his new father had come into his presence.
Brandon glanced at his wrist chronometer. Almost time to slam that door, shoving Lazarus out into space to meet the Martians. Five minutes.
He stood there, sweating. Then, decided, he put a tight audio beam straight on through to green Earth. Earth.
“Morgue Ship coming home. Morgue Ship coming home! Important cargo. Important cargo. Please meet us off the Moon!”
Setting the ship controls into an automatic mesh, he felt the thundering jets explode to life under him. It was not alone their shaking that pulsed through his body. It was something of himself, too. He was sick. He wanted to get back to Earth so badly he was violently ill with the desire. To forget all of war and death.
He could give Lazarus to the enemy and then turn homeward. Yes, he supposed he could do that. But, give up a second son where you already have given up one? No. No. Or, destroy the body now? Brandon fingered a ray-gun momentarily. Then he threw it away from him, eyes closed, swaying. No.
And if he should try to run away to Earth now? The Martians would pursue and capture him. There was no speed in a Morgue Ship to outdistance superior craft.
Brandon walked unsteadily to the side of the sleeping Scientist. He watched him a moment, touching him, looking at him with a lost light in his eyes.
Then, he began the final preparations, lifting the Scientist, going toward the life rocket.
* * * *
The Martians intercepted the emergency life-rocket at 5199CVZ. The Morgue Ship itself was nowhere visible. It had already completed its arc and was driving back toward Earth.
The body of Lazarus was hurried into the hospital cubicle of the Martian rocket. The body was laid upon a table, and immediate efforts were made to bring it out of its centuries of rest.
Lazarus reclined, silver uniform belted across the middle with soft mouse-grey leather, bronze symbol 51 over the heart.
Breathlessly, the Martians crowded in about the body, probing, examining, trying, waiting. The room got very warm. The little purple eyes blinked hot and tensed.
Lazarus was breathing deeply now, sighing into full aware life, Lazarus coming from the tomb. After three hundred years of avoid death.
Armed guards stood on both sides of the medical table, weapons poised, torture mechanisms ready to make Lazarus speak if he refused to tell.
The eyes of Lazarus fluttered open. Lazarus out of the tomb. Lazarus seeing his companions, iris widening upon itself, forcing shape out of mist. Seeing the curious blue skulls of anxious Martians collected in a watching crowd about him. Lazarus living, breathing, ready to speak.
Lazarus lifted his head, curiously, parted his lips, wetted them with his tongue, and then spoke. His first words were:
“What time is it?”
It was a simple sentence, and all of the Martians bent forward to catch its significance as one of the Martians replied:
“23:45.”
Lazarus nodded and closed his eyes and lay back. “Good. He’s safe then, by now. He’s safe.”
The Martians closed in, waiting for the next important words of the waking dead.
Lazarus kept his eyes closed, and he trembled a little, as if, in spite of himself, he couldn’t help it.
He said:
“My name is Brandon.”
Then, Lazarus laughed….
UNDERSEA GUARDIANS
Published in
Amazing Stories
in December 1944, “Undersea Guardians” was later on reprinted in January 1968 in the magazine
Fantastic
and included in three anthologies,
The Second Book of Unknown Tales of Horror
(1978),
Mysterious Sea Stories
(1985), and
Combat! Great Tales of World War II
(1992).
* * * *
The ocean slept quietly. There was little movement in its deep green silence. Along the floor of a watery valley some bright flecks of orange colour swam: tiny arrow-shaped fish. A shark prowled by, gaping its mouth. An octopus reached up lazily with a tentacle, wiggled it at nothing, and settled back dark and quiet.
Fish swam in and around the rusting, torn hulk of a submerged cargo ship, in and out of gaping holes and ripped ports. The legend on the prow said:
USS Atlantic.
It was quite soundless. The water formed around the ship like green gelatin.
And then Conda came, with his recruits.
They were swimming like dream-motes through the wide dark-watered valleys of the ocean; Conda at the head of the school with his red shock of hair flurried upright in a current, and his red bush beard trailed down over the massive ribs of his chest. He put out his great arms, clutched water, pulled back, and his long body shot ahead.
The others imitated Conda, and it was very quietly done. The ripple of white arms, cupped hands, the glimmer of quick moving feet, was like the movement of motion pictures from which the sound-track has been cut. Just deep water silence and the mute moves of Conda and his swarm.
Alita came close at his kicking heels. She swam with her sea-green eyes wide-fixed and dark hair spilling back over her naked body. Her mouth twisted with some sort of agony to which she could give no words.
Alita felt something moving at her side. Another, smaller, woman, very thin in her nakedness, with gray hair and a shrivelled husk of face that held nothing but weariness. She swam too, and would keep on swimming.
And then there was Helene, flashing by over their heads like an instantaneous charge of lightning. Helene with her hot angry eyes and her long platinum hair and her strange laughter.
“How much longer, Conda?” The old woman’s thought reached through the waters, touching the brains of them all as they swam.
“An hour. Perhaps only forty minutes!” came Conda’s blunt retort. It had the depth of fathoms in it; dark like the tides in the sunken water lands.
“Watch out!” somebody cried.
Down through the green waters overhead something tumbled. A shadow crossed the ocean surface, quick, like a gigantic sea-gull.
“Depth-charge!” shouted Conda. “Get away from it!”
Like so many frightened fish the twenty of them scattered instantly, with a flurry of legs, a spreading of arms, a diving of heads.
The depth-charge ripped water into gouts and shreds, spread terrific vibrations down to kick the sandy bottom, up to ram the surface like a geyser!
Alita screamed to herself as she sank, stunned, to the sea-floor, a queer strange pain going through her limbs. If only this were over, if only the real death came. If only it were over.
A shivering went through her. Quite suddenly the water was icy cold, and she was alone in the green emptiness. So very alone. Alone, staring at a dark ring on her left hand.