“ALL right, Brick, I’m ready for you now.”
“Hup!”
“You’re an ex-Marine, right?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Six four, two twenty, curly red hair, rugged but honest face, fists like hams.”
“Pavement breakers, sir.”
“How’s that?”
“I’d rather think of them being like pavement breakers, sir.”
“Okay, pavement breakers. Your name is Brick Bronson—”
“What’s yours, sir?”
“Gene Wolfe. And you’re in love with this girl called Carol Crane. You’ve never met her, but you’re in love with her. Her father is Dr. Charles Crane, the great biochemist. Dr. Crane has invented this serum that will save tens of billions of human lives—”
“Billions, sir?”
“Over the long haul. Say in twenty or thirty years. And a big pharmaceutical company is out to take it away from him. Their hit man is John Slade—”
“Got it.”
“Meanwhile, aliens in a flying saucer have landed. They need the serum too, and they want to take Dr. Crane back to Rigel to make the serum there. There’s a mixup—everybody’s fighting everybody else. You and Carol are kidnapped to Rigel on the saucer. You see strange but beautiful stuff there. Between the two of you, you fix up the Rigelians’ problems—”
“Right, sir.”
“They bring you back and you use Rigelian superscience to rescue Dr. Crane in an apocalyptic struggle. The End.”
Brick stroked his massive jaw.
“Sir!”
As he climbed into his faithful Ford pickup.
“Sir?”
“What’s the matter, Brick?”
“Sir, where am I going?”
“Out to Dr. Charles Crane’s famous Research Ranch to see Carol. You get there just as Slade arrives, and—”
“Sir, I don’t even know Carol, sir. You said we haven’t ever met. I’m just in love with her. I guess I saw her picture in the paper.”
“So you want to meet her, get to know her. You can pretend to be a reporter or something.”
“And, sir, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to drop by St. Michael’s and light a candle first. After all, if there’s going to be gunfights and all that—”
“How the hell do you know about gunfights?”
“I saw the deer rifle in the back of my pickup, sir. And going to Rigel. Rigel’s an awful way away, sir. Hundreds of light-years, maybe thousands—”
“Catholics don’t light candles any more, Brick.”
“I do, sir. I’m Irish, and my mother—”
“For Pete’s sake! Bronson’s not an Irish name.”
“What kind is it, sir?”
“It’s a pulp name. Now get going.”
Brick stroked his massive jaw as he climbed into his faithful Ford pickup with the .30-30 hanging over the rear window. Almost savagely, he kicked the engine to life. The sun hung heavy over the dusty streets of San Franco as he pointed the rusty hood toward the mountains and the famous Research Ranch of Dr. Charles Crane. Palms drooped in the heat.
Abruptly, he jerked the wheel to the left. St. Michael’s was only a few blocks out of his way. He was not a regular churchgoer—the ritual of the mass soothed him, but the improvements and variations irritated and distracted him, and since there were now more improvements and variations than ritual, he had scarcely attended since his discharge. Yet he had never truly doubted the existence and the goodness of God; and as he drove he imagined himself on his knees before the Holy Virgin while the bright flame of a newly lit candle proclaimed his devotion, the purity of his intentions toward Carol Crane.
The ground shook beneath his truck. A fissure appeared in the baking asphalt. He slammed on the brakes, throwing the pickup into a screaming skid-turn before it stopped. Tiles slid from the roof of a Spanish-style stucco house and crashed on the ground below. Someone screamed. All up and down the no-longer-sleepy street, people were running out of doors.
For reasons he could not have explained, he got out of the truck. The main shock hit just as his feet touched the ground, and it knocked him flat.
There is no other sound on earth like the collapse of a large building. He had never heard it before, but he heard it now, and he knew instinctively what it was.
“You all right, son?” The speaker was a fat man in a light blue sports shirt.
“Yeah, I’m okay.” Brick scrambled up. “Just got knocked off my pins.”
“Wonder if it cracked my slab,” the fat man said. He was looking speculatively at a small white bungalow.
“Something fell down.”
“Uh-huh. I heard it.” The fat man continued to stare at his house.
“I wouldn’t go back in there, sir. It might not be over yet.”
When the fat man did not answer, Brick started down the street on foot, ignoring the chattering, half-hysterical people who had fled their homes. Despite what he had said, he did not believe there would be more shocks. The quake had come, and it had done what it had been intended to do.
As he expected, St. Michael’s lay in ruins, stone tumbled upon stone. Save for the fine haze that still hung over its destruction, it might have been sacked by the Goths, pulled down by Gaiseric and his Vandals. “It’s a real mercy,” a woman told him. “Nobody inside. Father always locks up after the last morning mass.”
“I didn’t think they were ever locked,” Brick said absently.
“Guess I couldn’t have gotten in anyway.” He began to pick through the rubble and after five minutes of searching discovered a small statue of Mary the Mother of God holding the infant Jesus in her arms. The thumb of one hand and the head of the infant had been broken off. Mary’s nose was battered. He pulled the statue upright and for a moment knelt before it, crossing himself twice.
The ranch house was big and sprawling, partly fieldstone, partly wood. Behind it, obscured by the bulk of the house, stretched a long, low, almost windowless wooden building that was presumably Dr. Crane’s lab. Brick parked the truck beside a van and climbed out. A tall man with glossy black hair stood in the doorway watching him, arms folded, legs a bit too wide. Seeing him, Brick waved; the tall man conceded him no answering gesture. There was a stink like an open sewer—the reek of the corpses in a certain field of upland rice.
“Good morning, sir,” Brick called when he was closer. “I suppose you’re Dr. Crane. My name’s Brick Bronson. I’m a leg man for the San Franco Sun.” Under his breath he added, “Or something.”
The tall man in the doorway continued to watch him without replying. Brick was suddenly conscious that although the tall man’s face appeared in repose, his eyes were blazing; their stare carried an almost palpable heat.
“I’d like to talk to you about your daughter.”
“It is true that I have a daughter,” the tall man said, nearly whispering. “But you would not wish to speak of her if you were wise. Certainly you would not wish to see her. My name is Lucifer Satanus.”
Brick stretched out his hand.
Lucifer smiled at it. “That will not break my pavements,” he said. “Despite so many wild rumors, they are not laid of good intentions—which are, in my experience, quite easily broken. And I will not take it in mine, since that would be so painful for you. In return, I ask you not to make a certain disgusting gesture while in my presence. We both know the one I mean, do we not?”
“You’re the devil. I must be dreaming.”
“I am the Devil, in the sense that I am the emperor of all devils, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit. More to the point, as you shall see, I am the Prince of Sin. You are acquainted with sin, are you not?”
Brick nodded.
And the Devil laughed. “Ah, yes, those leaves in Saigon. Childish. You shall be better acquainted with it soon. You said you were dreaming. It is not now that you are dreaming, but when you thought you could appeal to a Higher Power, and that He would protect you from your author. Not in this world, Brick. By doing as you did, you have transformed yours into a religious story, and so released me upon yourself. Do you understand?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“I am gratified. By the way, the author has just informed me that you are torn between the desire to make that gesture and the urge to strike me in the face. Neither will be effectual, and there is one more thing I should tell you before I go. Earlier you were led to expect the Rigelians. They will not appear. I am here in their place.”
Brick’s big fist fanned empty air. As he stood staring at the spot where Lucifer Satanus had stood, he heard footsteps from inside the house. A rather stooped, white-haired man appeared, glanced at the open door in some surprise, and came to greet Brick. “I thought it was getting warm in here,” he said in a gentle, cultivated voice. “Someone’s been letting our air-conditioning out. You didn’t by any chance open this door, did you, young man?”
“No, sir. It was open when I pulled in. I was just about to ring your bell.”
“Strange.” The white-haired man hesitated a moment looking at the door, then extended his hand. “I’m Charles Crane, by the way.”
“Brick Bronson. It’s an honor, Dr. Crane.”
“Brick? Really? What an unusual name.”
Brick flushed. “Really it’s Roscoe. But when I was a kid somebody started calling me Brick. With a name like Roscoe, you can see why I stuck with it.”
The scientist smiled. “I do indeed. I shall call you Brick, and I hope you’ll call me Charles. Now won’t you step in out of the sun, Brick?”
West and east, supposed never to meet, met in that room. There were horns and antlers on the walls, and wide chairs covered with saddle-skirting; a Steinway grand and Dresden figurines.
“It’s a trifle mussed now,” Dr. Crane said, seating himself in the largest of the leather chairs and glancing at the untidy newspaper lying beside it. “This is one of Juanita’s days off. But do sit down, Brick. What can I do for you?”
Brick cleared his throat. “When you saw that open door, Doc …” He hesitated.
“Yes?”
“Well, you said, ‘Strange.’ Something about the way you said it made me think that there had been other strange things going on. I’d like you to tell me about them.”
For a moment the scientist’s white eyebrows rose in two little arches; then the corners of his mouth followed them. “All right,” he said. “I don’t see what harm it can do. A good many of the rooms of this house overlook the valley—possibly you noticed that on your drive up. There have been some odd-looking lights down there and some more in the air over our mountain.”
“UFOs?”
“Flying objects that I, at least, cannot identify, yes.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about those any more, Doc. But I don’t think those were what was worrying you, mostly. You’d be curious and excited about saucers, if there were any such thing.”
“You don’t believe in them?”
“Not now, no. What’s the real problem, Doc?”
The white-haired scientist shrugged. “Just a feeling of being watched. Paranoia, if you like. Then once, when the feeling was very strong and I stopped what I was doing and looked about, I could almost swear I saw the flash of binoculars up on the mountainside.”
“I understand.”
“I hope you do, young man, because I don’t. Now I’ve answered your question, and I’m going to ask you one of my own. Why are you here?”
Brick hesitated. “I know about your work: the serum.”
“There was something in the newspaper, I believe.”
“Down in San Franco I’ve heard some rumors. Third- and fourth-hand stuff, but somebody’s after you, Doc. Somebody with money and an organization. They want that serum bad.”
“In a few months, when I’ve perfected the process, they will only have to ask. I intend to offer my serum to humanity without charge.”
“I don’t think they want it like that. They want it all, and that’s why I’m here. With me around, I don’t think they’re going to get it unless you want to give it to them.”
“You’re offering me your services as a security officer. Have you credentials?”
“Maybe none you’d find convincing. The Silver Star, and a few boxing and marksmanship trophies. But you can judge for yourself if I’m qualified. Let me stay here and keep an eye on things for you, and when you’ve had a chance to check me out, we’ll talk about pay. If you don’t think I’ve earned any, I’ll be on my way.”
“I’ll have—”
A radiantly lovely girl stepped into the room, then hesitated. “I’m sorry, Dad. I thought you were alone.”
“It’s quite all right, Carol. This is Mr. Bronson. He’ll be staying with us for a few days at least.”
That night in the guest room Brick cleaned and oiled his Winchester before preparing for bed.
“Sir! Mr. Wolfe, sir!”
“For Pete’s sake, Brick. You’ll wake everybody up.”
“They can’t hear me. They’re on another part of the page. Listen, sir, the old guy’s nice enough, but I came out here for the girl.”
“So what?”
“I got a fifteen-second look, and the next thing I know I’m up here with this damn gun. Sir, you laid the Devil himself on me. They don’t come any rougher than that. Don’t I have any rights?”
“No. Not one single goddam one.”
“Sir, I’ll die.”
“I won’t let you.”
“Not that way, sir. I’ll die inside. I’ll turn into a store window dummy and a tape recorder. Pull the string and I say my lines, push me over and I’ll never get up.”
There was a soft tap at the door.
“Come in,” Brick called. “It’s not locked.”
Carol entered, closing the door swiftly behind her. She wore a quilted robe. “You’ll think I’m terrible,” she said. “But I have to talk to someone.”
“I couldn’t think you were terrible under any circumstances,” Brick told her.
“It’s Father. He’s in danger.”
“I know.”
“He’s been getting things in the mail. Notes …”
“Threatening letters? He should have showed them to me.”
“I think he’s destroyed them. But he’s afraid. You don’t know him, Brick, but I do, and for the first time in his life, he’s frightened. He’s had a burglar alarm installed in the lab, and he’s talking about getting a watchdog.”
“He’s got one now. Me. You don’t have to worry any more.”
“Brick, I want him to die. But—”
A shot rang out.
Brick was off the bed and out the door in one long jump, the Winchester in one hand and half-a-dozen cartridges in the other. The moon, shining through the windows, provided just enough illumination for him to find his way in the unfamiliar ranch house.
To his left he heard the sob of indrawn breath, then the unmistakable sound a rifle bolt makes as it is drawn back to kick out empty brass and shoved forward to bring another round into the chamber. He had already slipped his own cartridges into the magazine; now he jerked down the lever and brought it up again.
“Brick? Is that you?” Beneath the words hung the familiar reek of gunsmoke.
“Yeah, it’s me, Doc. You okay?”
Light streamed from an open doorway. “I’m fine, Brick. But I don’t think our friend here is in such good shape.”
Still in a half crouch, Brick sprang into the room. Dr. Crane was standing near an open window, a Springfield rifle in one hand and a small black automatic in the other. He held the automatic up. “Do you know about these? Is it going to fire?”
“A PPK. Not unless you give the trigger a good hard pull.” Brick took the automatic and thrust it into his belt, then glanced down at the man who lay at the scientist’s feet.
He was small and dark, like his weapon, with a fuzzy beard that concealed most of the lower half of his face. His moccasins were worn, his jeans ragged; one side of his faded denim shirt was soaked with his blood.
Brick knelt beside him. “Better get on the phone, Doc. Get an ambulance up here.”
Carol’s voice said, “I’ll do it.”
“Thanks.”
Bending over Brick and the wounded man, Dr. Crane asked, “Do you think he’ll live?”
“He might. He’s young. I’ve seen them hurt worse than this and still pull through. And I’ve seen some that weren’t hit this bad die. Right lung’s collapsed. You have silvertips in that rifle?”
The scientist shook his head. “Full jacket. Target ammunition. I was going to sight it in before elk season opened.”
“That saved him.” Brick rolled the wounded man over and slipped a wallet out of his hip pocket. “A silvertip would have blown out a hole the size of your hat, and he’d be dead already. You have first-aid supplies here? Gauze or tape? We can at least slow down the bleeding.”
“Yes,” Dr. Crane said. He seemed irresolute. “I’ll get them.” Brick flipped open the wounded man’s wallet, glanced at the contents, rubbed the side of his nose with one finger, then looked again.
When Carol returned, adding her own soft perfume to the pure desert air that floated through the open window, he had already staunched the flow of blood. She asked, “Do you need anything else?”
“A blanket to keep him warm. He’s in shock.”
She brought a striped Indian blanket from the sofa and helped Brick tuck it around the wounded man and raise his feet.
“Ambulance say they were coming?”
“Right away, they said.” She paused. “But it’s about twenty-five miles.”
Brick glanced at his wristwatch. “Half an hour.”
“I suppose. You can’t do anything more for him?”
“No. He needs to get the blood out of his chest cavity, and any pieces of cloth and bone that may be in there with it. I don’t think we have to worry about the bullet—it made a clean exit. Then the lung could be patched and reinflated and so on. But we don’t have the equipment for any of that.”
“Who is he, Brick?”
Brick grinned at her. “I’m glad you asked. I was trying to figure out how to ask you if you knew him.”
Carol shook her head.
“According to the stuff in his wallet, his name’s John Slade. That ring any bells?”
Carol shook her head again. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”
They both turned at the sound of footsteps. It was Dr. Crane, still carrying his rifle.
“Where’ve you been, Doc?”
“Outside.” The scientist dropped into a chair. “I thought there might be more.”
“That was a hell of a risky thing to do.”
“I doubt it. You say they want the formula for my serum, and if that is the case, the last thing they would be apt to do is to kill me before they get it.”
“Sounds logical. I just hope they make as much sense as you do.”
Under her breath, Carol murmured, “He wants to show you he’s as brave as you are.”
Brick gave no indication of having heard her. “Find anybody?”
The scientist shook his head. “No. No one.”
“How’d he get here? Car?”
“I didn’t see one. Do you know, I never thought of that?”
“No horse? Nothing?”
“I didn’t see any. No.”
Carol said, “Could he have been landed by helicopter?”
“Not close, or I would have heard it,” Brick told her. “Of course, they could have dropped him out in the desert a mile or so. Or somebody else could have been with him—somebody who drove his car away when he heard the shot. Doc, does the name John Slade mean anything to you? I’ve already asked your daughter.”
“Is that who he is?”
“His wallet says so. Belongs to a lot of environmental groups and conservation clubs. Know the name?”
The scientist shook his head.
“How about the face? I don’t want to have to turn him over again, but you saw him before, and if you look, you can still see him pretty well.”
“Perhaps without the beard. But I doubt it.”
“John Slade wasn’t the name signed to those threatening letters you got?”
Dr. Crane’s head jerked up. “How did you know about those?”
“Just a shot in the dark. You were worried when I came here, and tonight you were jumpy enough to grab a loaded rifle when you heard Slade here outside—”
“I didn’t hear him. I saw him in the moonlight.”
“Swell. Instead of going to bed or reading or maybe watching TV, you were standing around looking out of windows. That has to be something more than some guy up on the mountain with field glasses. Hell, that could have been a birdwatcher or somebody on the lookout for the UFOs. I figured you’d been getting letters or phone calls. Maybe both, but people don’t usually sign phone calls.”
Laying his rifle across his knees, the scientist ran both hands through his abundant white hair. “I see. No, John Slade wasn’t the name.”
“What was?”
The scientist ignored the question. “The most recent came today, in the mail. They’ve all been mailed. About six, I think. Perhaps seven. It said that he had found someone to kill me, and he would send him, have him do it, unless I—”
“Go on, Doc.”
“Unless I made a certain gesture of surrender. Set fire to my laboratory.”
Brick whistled softly.
“I couldn’t do it, you understand. I wouldn’t do it. Literally, I would prefer to die.”
Carol was stroking the wounded man’s cheek. “Brick, his skin is clammy. Damp and cold.”
“That’s shock. There’s nothing we can do besides what we’ve already done.”
“Shouldn’t we be hearing the ambulance by now?”
Brick glanced at his watch. “Not yet.”
“I know they shouldn’t be here yet, but shouldn’t we hear them? At night we can hear ambulances and fire engines way down in the valley.”
Brick’s shoulders moved a sixteenth of an inch. “I wouldn’t know about that. Doc, I’d like to see some of those letters.”
“You can’t. I burned them. I didn’t want Carol to find them.” The old scientist hesitated. “I suppose you killed a great many men in Viet Nam. I—I’ve hunted all my life, but I’ve never killed anyone before.”
“You still haven’t. If that meat wagon gets here in time, there’s still a chance he’ll pull through. You burn the envelopes too?”
Dr. Crane nodded.
“You happen to notice where they were postmarked from?”
Dr. Crane nodded again. “From San Franco, all the postmarks that could be read.”
“I see. Doc, I’ve been waiting for you to tell me how they were signed, but it seems like you’re not going to unless I ask you. So don’t tell me it was the Blue Avenger or some crap like that. You recognized the name?”
The old scientist laughed. It was a dry sound, humorless as the shaking of a pebble in an empty jar. He stood and, still carrying his rifle, started out of the room. “Yes,” he said over his shoulder. “Yes, you could say I did.”
Brick glanced at Carol, but she seemed as puzzled as he. After a moment he asked, “Is there any chance he’ll kill himself?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. There was an edge of bitterness in her voice.
“But you wish he would.”
“Sometimes, I suppose.”
“You don’t act like it when he’s around.”
She bit her lip. “Brick, maybe sometime I’ll explain. But this isn’t the time or the place, and I’ve only known you a few hours.”
“It may be the only time and place we’ll ever have,” he said gently. “The story may be over soon.”
“What are you talking about?”
He managed a rueful little shrug. “Things are happening fast tonight.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You and I could climb out this window, just like Slade climbed in. We could walk around in the desert in the moonlight, holding hands. But it would mean leaving him, and he might start bleeding again.”
“We can’t do that.”
“I know we can’t. And so I thought maybe we could pretend we did, if it was all right with you. Carol, when they were flying me overseas, the plane had a little trouble, and we set down on some little island in the Pacific. I don’t even remember the name of it now.”
She watched him, her blue eyes as serious as his.
“There was a landing strip there left over from World War II. They still maintained it, and once or twice a month a mail plane came and so forth. We stayed there a couple of days until they could fly in a part for one of our engines. There were a lot of birds on that island, and it was the mating season.”
He paused and chuckled softly. “They would pair off and kind of bob up and down at each other, and keep it up for hours. Sometimes one would go get an oyster shell and lay it at the other’s feet. I guess the one that carried the shell was the male, or maybe they both did it. Anyway, there was an ornithologist—a bird scientist—who’d come to study them. He was taking pictures and stuff, and one day I got to talking with him.”
“Yes, Brick?”
“I asked why they did it, why they bobbed up and down like that. And he told me they had to. It didn’t matter how much they wanted to get together. To mate. If they didn’t bob up and down like that, they couldn’t do it.”
“That’s sad, isn’t it? Sad, and a little funny. But I don’t understand why you’re telling me about it now.”
“I just meant that we’re people, not birds. If I could bring you candy and flowers and take you someplace to dance—or for a walk in the desert in the moonlight—that would be nice. But we don’t have to do it.”
“You want us to—to be lovers? With this man bleeding on the floor?”
“I want us to be sweethearts. Sweethearts love each other, and they trust each other.”
Carol hesitated, then raised a finger to her lips. “Shh! Dad’s coming back.”
Dr. Crane seemed more relaxed now. The rifle was gone; so was his suit coat. He dropped into a chair and looked benevolently and distantly down on the two younger people. “Is he going to die?” he asked.
“If that ambulance doesn’t get here pretty soon, he is, Doc.”
“Good.”
Carol’s hand flew to her mouth. “Dad!”
“You want him to die, Doc?”
“Of course I do. He came into my house to kill me.”
“Then you should have put another bullet in him.”
“I suppose I should have. At the time I was too shocked. I saw him outside the window, you know. And I recalled reading somewhere that it was best to wait until a prowler had actually entered, that there would be less difficulty with the police that way.” The scientist tittered, then seemed to bite the shrill laughter back. “And so I waited. He silhouetted himself ever so nicely against the moon when he climbed over the sill. Just like one of those man-shaped targets you see at the range.”
Brick walked over to him and looked into his eyes. They were blind circles, like two flecks of blue paint.
“I waited until I heard his foot on my floor—a little, shuffling sound. Then I squeezed off the shot. Actually, I couldn’t aim very well. That scope isn’t meant for shooting in the dark.”
“He’s high,” Brick told Carol. “Do you know what he uses?” She shook her head. “I’ve seen him this way before, but not often.”
“In Nam I saw a lot of heroin and hash, but they don’t talk that much on heroin, and hash doesn’t do that to your eyes. What is it, Doc?”
The scientist giggled and shook his head.
“Come on, what did you shoot up on? Morphine? If you’ve got some, it might help this guy here.”
Unexpectedly, the wounded man stirred.
“I won’t say,” Dr. Crane told Brick. “And you can’t force me to. At this very moment there is a curtain—a wonderful curtain, invisible, beautiful, the strongest and most beautiful invisible object ever seen—between myself and yourself. Between myself and the world. Do you wish to burn my arms with cigarettes? Please go ahead.”
“I’ve quit smoking, Doc.” Brick had already turned away to see to the wounded John Slade. Slade’s eyes opened, fluttered closed, then opened again.
“It’s okay, buddy,” Brick told him. “You’ve been hurt, but an ambulance is on the way. You’ve lost a lot of blood, that’s all. Don’t try to get up.”
Carol grasped his arm. “Brick, listen! Don’t you hear it?” A muted whine, faint as the scratching of a stereo needle when the record is over, floated up from the valley and in through the open window, a distant siren’s song.
Brick nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
“We can’t let them see Dad. We’ve got to get him out of here.”
“Not until I find out what I’ve got to. Doc, you said you recognized the name on those letters. Whose was it?”
“The name I know best …” The words trailed off into high-pitched laughter.
Brick slapped the scientist’s left cheek. The smack of his callused hand might almost have been the report of a small gun.
“You’re going to have to tell me, or I won’t be able to help you and your daughter. No matter how high you are right now, you must know that you’re going to have to come down sometime.”
The scientist giggled until a second blow snapped his head back. A trickle of dark blood stained his chin.
“If I’m not able to help you then, you’re going to have a lot worse problem than some ambulance guy who saw you stoned.”
“Which is my own, of course,” Dr. Crane murmured. “Charles C. Crane, Ph.D. That is how they were signed, you see, young man. My own name. My signature. My handwriting.”
“You wrote them yourself?”
The scientist stared off into space, watching something no one else could see.
Carol said, “Brick, he couldn’t have!”
“Sure he could. Funnier things have happened.”
“But why—”
“You don’t like him and I don’t like him. Maybe he doesn’t like himself much either. He get into town often?”
“Hardly ever.”
“There’s no box out at the road. How does he get his mail?”
“We have a post office box in town.”
“I thought so. Who picks the mail up?”
“I do. I mail his letters too, and they’re letters I’ve typed myself. If he had written anything by hand, I would have noticed it.”
“When I came here today, he said something about a housekeeper named Juanita. Said she was off. Does she go into town to shop?”
Carol nodded. “Groceries and things. But, Brick, Juanita can’t drive. I have to take her in, in our van. I drop her at the supermarket, do my own errands and pick up the mail and any supplies Dad may have ordered—there’s a scientific and medical supply house in San Franco—then come back to the market and get her. Today I drove her to her sister’s in Rio Lodo.”
Brick stroked his chin. “Somebody’s forging his handwriting, then. That’s what it looks like.”
“But why would anyone want to do that?”
“For the psychological effect, I suppose. It seems to have worked. It should be pretty unsettling to realize that somebody who’s after you can write letters, checks, or whatever, using your name, whenever he wants to. Besides, it might throw the police off, so if you’re going to disguise your handwriting anyway, why not disguise it as your victim’s?”
The twitching of the wounded man’s face drew their attention. Hoarsely and almost unintelligibly he said, “Not forged.”
“What’s that?” Brick bent over him.
“Not forged.” He gasped for breath. “He … Xerox …” The whisper trailed away.
“What the hell does that mean?” Brick muttered.
Carol suggested, “That the letters Dad has been getting are really copies of letters he once wrote someone else?”
Slade gasped, “Please. Terribly thirsty.”
“Get him a glass of water,” Brick said. “I’ll roll him over and try to hold him up a little.”
The song of the siren was much louder now as the ambulance wound its way up the mountain road. Brick listened to it, and to the whisper of Carol’s slippers as she went into the kitchen. Dr. Crane slumped in his chair. “Sin,” Brick said to himself. “Lucifer Satanus, Prince of Sin, you did all this to us. Dope. Attempted murder. Lies. But if you’re real, He has to be real too.”
He looked down at the wounded Slade to see if he was being overheard, and realized that he was not in fact speaking. Or rather that the Brick who spoke was an inner Brick, a sort of operator animating the clay figure that supported the wounded man. This second, inner Brick reached beneath his shirt for the silver medal his mother had once given him, then remembered that he had lost it in a rice field almost ten thousand miles away.
“This stuff isn’t going to help you, Brick.”
“If the Devil’s real, sir, there has to be a God too. The Devil had to be cast out by someone.”
“Now you’re a theologian. You’re supposed to be an ex-Marine.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“There is no God for you, Brick, and your Devil wasn’t cast out by anybody. He was cast by me, and cast into your life by me. If you’ve a God at all—never mind.”
“Here, Brick darling.” Carol handed him a glass of cold water. “If you don’t think it will hurt him.”
“Not if he sips it. It’s not a stomach wound.” Brick held the glass to Slade’s lips. “Carol, you called me darling.”
“It slipped out, I guess.”
“I hope it slips out often.”
“Careful, you’ll drown him. Oh, Brick!”
“What is it?”
“Why did we have to meet like this? It could have been so much nicer.”
“Because I fished a statue out of the rubble this afternoon.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“And I can’t explain, Carol. Not now, anyway.” He put down the glass. “Will you kiss me, Carol? I’ve loved you from the beginning, and I’ve got a feeling it’s the only kiss we’ll ever get.”
She kissed him. Somewhere down the mountain road the ambulance rounded a beetling outcrop. Its siren was suddenly louder, rising and falling like the whooping of a wolf.
“Again,” Brick pleaded.
“They’re coming. I have to get Dad out of here. I’ll lock him in his bedroom.” She hurried over to the narcotized scientist, seeming to pull him erect by main strength.
Brick felt the PPK slipping out of his belt and began a frenzied judo chop with his right hand.
The sound of the shot filled the room, springing back from the walls with doubled force. The little German automatic went skittering across the carpet. Brick dropped Slade and leaped to his feet.
For an instant, he thought the shot had missed. Then, very slowly at first, Dr. Crane began to crumple. A red stain spread across his white shirt.
Carol released him and backed away, hands covering her face. Slowly, then, it seemed, very fast, the old scientist pitched forward on his face. Outside, the ambulance ground to a stop.
“Sorry. Really sorry …” The whispering voice was Slade’s. Brick demanded, “Why did you do it?”
“Would’ve … killed us all. Killed … world. He would. Told me. Billions of lives …”
There was a sharp knock at the door. “Let them in,” Brick snapped to Carol. He bent over the wounded Slade. “What are you talking about?”
“Crane serum would’ve saved billions. No room. No more animals, plants. We’d be”—the wounded man gasped for air—“standing on everybody’s shoulders. All have died.”
“So you came here to kill him first.” Brick heard the door open, the confused footsteps of the paramedics.
“Dr. Crane told me …” Slade’s whisper was nearly lost.
“Burn lab …”
A paramedic grasped Brick’s shoulder and leaned heavily upon it as he bent to peer at Slade. “What happened to him?”
Slade sighed, “No space … for billions. Not till we get into space. Dr. Crane …”
“Gunshot,” Brick told the paramedic. “They shot each other.” It sounded so simple when he said it that way.
“He won’t make it,” the paramedic said. Swaying a little, he straightened up.
“Goddamit, aren’t you even going to try to save him? Give him plasma?”
“Won’t make it,” the paramedic said again. “Going into coma now. DOA for sure.”
“Brick,” Carol called, “what’s the matter with them?”
The other paramedic said thickly, “What’s the matter with you?”
Brick stood. “Drunk, I think. I don’t smell it on them, so it must have been vodka, or maybe medicinal alcohol.”
“Listen, Mac,” the first paramedic said. “We’re not drunk. Sure, we had a couple, but we’re not drunk.”
“Fine,” Brick told him. “Get this guy some plasma. What about the old man?”
“Old guy’s DOA,” the second paramedic told him. “No respiration, no pulse. Got a bullet in the belly and his heart gave out.”
The first paramedic said again, “Listen, Mac, we’re not drunk. You know what we’ve been doin’ all day? You know?”
“You got plasma in your ambulance?”
“We’ve been draggin’ the bodies out. That’s what we’ve been doin’. Had a big quake down in San Franco, see? Eight point one on the Richter scale. Women. Kids. My God, you should have seen them.”
Brick took him by the arm. “Let’s go get some plasma,” he said wearily. “This man’s still alive.”
“That man’s dead,” the paramedic told him. “He just hasn’t stopped breathin’ yet.”
They got the needle into Slade’s arm and carried him out to the ambulance, then took out Dr. Crane.
“He did it to me,” Carol said softly. “When I was just a little girl. About once a week for a year. Finally, Mother found out and made him stop. I’ve never been able to forgive him for that. I was hoping … But I still can’t.” She shuddered. “I suppose I never will. Oh, Christ!”
The second paramedic stumbled and dropped his end of the stretcher. Dr. Crane’s body rolled off onto the graveled drive. With the sheet pulled partially away from his face, he appeared to be wearing a surgeon’s mask.
Brick turned Carol around until she could no longer see the corpse. “Why did you stay?”
Her shoulders moved up and down under his fingers. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.”
She drew a deep breath. “Brick, we’ll be rich. I know where he kept the formula for his serum—a brown notebook in his desk in the lab. He was just working out a system for making the serum in quantity, and any pharmaceutical company could do that. It virtually eliminates the onset of degenerative diseases. People will pay anything for it. Think of all the rich old men.”
“He was going to give it away,” Brick told her.
“For the prestige! That was all he cared about. Medals, the Nobel Prize. He wanted somebody to endow a real research center for him, where he could boss a big staff.”
“Sure,” Brick said.
The first paramedic was bending over Dr. Crane. “Hey!” he called. “The old guy’s heart’s started again. Shock must have done it.” For a second he stood there blinking, trying to reason through an alcoholic fog. “I’ll give him some oxygen. Might have some brain damage, though. He was out quite a while.”
“Give the other one some too,” Brick instructed him. “It might help.”
“It might at that.”
Brick helped them get the old scientist into the ambulance, watched the first paramedic fumbling with his oxygen equipment for a moment, then closed the rear door. The second paramedic stumbled toward the cab.
Brick asked, “You going to drive?”
“Guess so. Al’s busy back there.”
“Al drove up?”
The second paramedic nodded.
“With you getting smashed most of the way. You’re in no shape to drive. The girl will drive for you.”
“My bus? Forget it.”
Brick hit him so hard his feet left the ground.
Carol opened her mouth to scream, then shut it again. Brick said, “Think you can drive this? Shouldn’t be much different from your van.”
“I—I suppose so.”
“Sure you can. I’ll put him in front with you. I think I broke his jaw, and that will give him something to worry about if he wakes up.”
“Brick! Aren’t you coming too?”
“I’ll follow you in my pickup,” Brick said. “Otherwise we won’t have any transportation once we get to the hospital. I’d drive, but I don’t know where it is. Now get going.”
He stood in the road and watched the ambulance’s red tail lights until they vanished around a bend. A few seconds later, the siren came on. Carol had found the switch, he reflected.
There was a galvanized scrub bucket in Juanita’s kitchen. He used his pocket knife to cut the hose from the rinsing nozzle on the sink. In the living room, where two men had nearly died, he found Slade’s PPK under a sofa and thrust it into his belt again, then retrieved his Winchester from the corner where he had left it.
Back outside, he hung the Winchester on its mounts in the back of the pickup’s cab and siphoned gasoline from the tank until the bucket was half full. Over a gallon, he figured. Nearly two bucks’ worth. Carefully he positioned the bucket near—but not too near—the back of the laboratory, struck a match and tossed it in.
The gas caught with a sound like the cracking of a giant whip. He jumped backward, then sprinted for the shadow of a hillock of boulders and sand. He had no sooner reached it and turned to watch the dancing flames than the giant’s fist struck him behind the ear. For an instant he saw the dark ground leaping toward him, but he was unconscious before he struck it.
When he woke, it was to hear a rending, grinding crash. Vaguely he pictured cars meeting head-on outside his dingy room in San Franco, or a car crushed under the wheels of a tractor-trailer.
He shifted his head. Sand grated on his cheek; the night wind stirred his hair. His hands would not come forward to help him up. After a moment, he found that they were bound behind his back. Much of the feeling had left his arms. He struggled erect without them, rolling on one side to get his knees under him, pushing himself up with an elbow.
The crash had been his pickup. Its hood was buried now in the big double doors at the back of the lab. Orange flames danced along its sides.
“You’re awake,” a familiar voice said behind him. “Would you like a closer view of the fire? I ran your truck over your bucket of gasoline, and it really should be quite spectacular.”
Brick turned. “Hello, Doc. All right if I call you that?”
“Certainly.”
“You look just like him too, nearly as I can see. Except you haven’t been shot lately. Twin?”
The second Dr. Crane shook his head.
“Then the Russians or somebody fixed you up to look like him, I guess. Plastic surgery and so forth.”
“You are a curious man, whoever you are. Doesn’t it concern you that you’re about to die?”
“I didn’t know I was.”
“And you are ludicrously incorrect about the Russians. Appearance, voice, height—I doubt very much if they, or anyone on earth, could do so well.” The second Dr. Crane gestured with Slade’s black PPK. “Now, forward. Whether or not you care to have a better view of the conflagration, I do.”
Brick started toward the burning truck. “I’ve never had any luck at all with that gun.”
“And now you never will.”
“Right. I figured, though, that if I made it look like the lab was burning, that would smoke out whoever had been sending the real Doc those letters. I was right about that, anyway.”
“You were wrong about that,” the second Dr. Crane told him. “I was here already, watching from behind those boulders. You very nearly trampled me when you ran there to hide. Fortunately, the light of the fire you had started in that bucket must have impeded your night vision.”
Brick said, “Or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it. You’re a clone, right? I’ve heard of that.”
“No. I am a copy. But wouldn’t you like to know what I struck you with?”
“Not particularly. This close enough?” The heat of the burning truck washed his cheeks. The laboratory building itself was beginning to catch now.
“Yes, this will do. It was a stone. A common desert stone. Was that courageous of me? A slight and rather elderly man?”
“I guess so.”
“But I had no alternative. Had I fled, you would have heard me, pursued me, and almost certainly caught me within a hundred yards. Had I remained as I was, you would surely have noticed me. As it happened, I struck; and in striking, I won. But if I had possessed a pistol of my own, I would have killed my original almost an hour ago, when he came poking about with my—pardon me, his—hunting rifle. Did he suppose I would come so near my old home as that?”
Brick said, “He was mostly showing off, but the pressure got to be too much for him.” He glanced at his burning truck and took a step toward the second Dr. Crane, who stepped back.
“I warn you, if you attempt to run at me, I’ll fire.”
“Then I won’t attempt it, Doc. Tell me about this copying business. Your man Slade said something about xerography, but we thought he meant the letter had been copied.”
Momentarily the second Dr. Crane looked puzzled. “Some, ah, people came. Nearly a month ago, now. Our electricity went off, all of it. I thought it was some sort of storm … . They landed out there, out in the desert.”
He looked sharply at Brick. “I don’t suppose you believe a word of this, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll be dead quite soon.”
“Go on,” Brick said.
“I was working here in the laboratory, the original I. They came and got me. My daughter and my cook must have been sleeping, and I don’t think they ever knew. Presumably, they were not permitted to wake up until the others had left. What is your name, by the way?”
“Bronson.”
“I’m Charles Crane, as you know. Mr. Bronson, I’m supposed to be a biochemist, but I don’t know quite how to explain. Suppose I were a medieval scribe. I’d spend my days in copying the Bible: beautiful lettering, illustrated capitals. You’ve seen them?”
Brick nodded.
“And then someone showed me a modern color copier. Lay a page on it—and there it is again, just as good. Or nearly just as good. That was what they did. They wanted me, you see. Or at least, they wanted a Charles Crane to take back to wherever they came from. I can’t imagine why, unless they’d forgotten the principles they’d used to build that machine. Or perhaps they had not built it, had got it from some other culture. In any event they made a copy, then wiped an hour or so from the memories of the original.”
“But you escaped?”
The second Dr. Crane shook his head. “I was left over, if you wish to put it so. They made me first, I think. I know that I am Charles Cabot Crane. I recall my childhood, college, marriage, my entire career. But when I remember all those things, I know that I would do certain things I did not do at the time.”
“I see,” Brick said. The fire was advancing in columns along the walls of the laboratory building, blistering their dark paint.
“I don’t think I’m a very good copy. Not a perfect copy, at least. They threw me away, just left me behind.”
“A little surprise for the real Doc.” Brick glanced at the truck again; its steel body glowed with heat. “Why’d you want him to burn his lab?”
The copy smiled. It was almost a pleasant smile. “To destroy his notebook, of course. My notebook. You see, there is a flaw in the formula. The serum can be produced, and it will work—stave off cancer, cardiovascular degeneration, and so on. But in less than an hour it goes bad.”
“So that was why the Doc delayed making a formal announcement of his discovery. He said he was working on a way to manufacture it in quantity, and that bothered me. Like his daughter said, any of the big drug companies could have worked out a production method, and they probably could have done it better than he could.”
“But it could not be made in quantity, you see, Mr. Bronson, until that flaw was eliminated. It had to be made and used on the spot, which rendered it rather impractical. But I, in that last hour, the hour before they landed, found the way to eliminate that flaw. I recorded it in my notebook.”
“You mean the real Doc did,” Brick told him. “Then the saucer people wiped his memory out, and he didn’t look back at that page, because he thought he knew what was on it.”
“Exactly.”
“And now, you plan to replace him. You know Slade didn’t kill him?”
“But he may have brain damage—yes, I overheard all that was said, once you were outside. For my purpose, it could not have worked itself out better. When he is somewhat recovered, Carol will bring him back here; and I will eliminate him and take his place—a miraculous recovery. Not even Carol need know.”
“And blame me for destroying the lab. Just in case the brain damage isn’t all that bad, or some other scientist shows up to go through his stuff.”
“Correct again. The building was locked, so you rammed the doors with your truck. The fire started as a result, and you fled into the desert. And now that I have seen that the fire will do what I want, you and I will indeed go into the desert.”
“Where you’ll kill me, and hide my body.”
“Would you rather I kill you here? I would prefer not to have to drag you a mile or so. But if I must, I will. Walk, and you will have a few moments more—”
There was a shot.
The bullet’s impact almost knocked the second Dr. Crane off his feet; reeling, he regained his balance, waved the PPK futilely in the direction of the burning truck.
Brick kicked it from his hand. “You’ll never get the guy that got you, Doc. There isn’t anybody.”
“I’m wounded … .”
“Sure you are. If you get a gun hot enough, and it’s got a round in the chamber, it’ll go off. I’ve seen machine guns start to fire like that, with nobody pulling the trigger, because a few long bursts had overheated the barrel. My deer rifle was hanging in the back of the truck, and there was a round in the chamber because I jacked one in when I heard the real Doc shoot the poor kid you sent in after him. When you walked me over here, I lined you up with it as well as I could.”
The second Dr. Crane was watching the blood that seeped from between his fingers.
“You’ve been shot in the belly, Doc. Just like he was. It would be interesting to know what’s happened to the one in the saucer—I think maybe there’s some sort of link between the three of you. But now if you want me to patch you up, you’d better untie me.”
The second Dr. Crane said nothing. His face looked gray, even in the reddish light of the fire. Tears trickled down the gray cheeks.
“You don’t believe that crap you fed Slade, do you? We’ll be saving the best people—engineers, physicists, craftsmen. If somebody’d found that serum in time, we’d still have Einstein, and by now we’d be selling fried chicken on Mars.”
The knees went first. The copy’s bloodstained hands never left his waist to block his fall. Brick cursed, then dropped to the ground and lifted his hips and legs, kicking and squirming until his knife slid from his pocket.
It took thirty seconds or so to get it open, and another thirty to cut away the electrical tape the second Dr. Crane had taken from his truck. By the time he got into the laboratory, the whole place was full of smoke and chemical fumes. Bottles of solvent were bursting like mortar shells. He tried to recall whether Carol had ever mentioned the location of the desk, tried to hold his eyes open. Soon he could not. He dropped to the floor, hoping to find better air.
“You see what it got you, Brick. You might have been rich and famous, married to a lovely woman. Where is the God you prayed to now?”
“Everywhere, sir. Nowhere. I still haven’t seen him.”
“You never will.”
“But you’ll see me.”
“What are you talking about? You’re burning to death right now, dying of smoke inhalation.”
“But He made me real. You’ll pass me on the street someday, see me in some crowd. Don’t mess with me then. Fists like pavement breakers, remember?”
“Brick, you can never be real. Not real the way I am. When this is over, you’ll be left behind on the page.”
“You sound a little scared, sir. Maybe you’ve already felt me close to you in the movie theater, seen me waving at the ballgame, heard my voice around some city corner.”
“How did you know that?”
“Answer me, Brick! How did you know that?
“All right, on TV tonight they showed a man who got pulled out of a fire in California. But his name was Rick, Rick Benson.
“As well as I could hear it.
“That wasn’t you, was it, Brick?
“Brick?
“Answer me! Brick … ?”