Leigh Brackett: An Anthology

by LEIGH BRACKETTMel Gray flung down his hoe with a sudden tigerish fierceness and stood erect. Tom Ward, working beside him, glanced at Gray's Indianesque profile, the youth of it hardened by war and the hells of the Eros prison blocks. A quick flash of satisfaction crossed Ward's dark eyes. Then he grinned and said mockingly. "Hell of a place to spend the rest of your life, ain't it?" Mel Gray stared with slitted blue eyes down the valley. The huge sun of Mercury seared his n***d body. Sweat channeled the dust on his skin. His throat ached with thirst. And the bitter landscape mocked him more than Wade's dark face. "The rest of my life," he repeated softly. "The rest of my life!" He was twenty-eight. Wade spat in the damp black earth. "You ought to be glad—helping the unfortunate, building a haven for the derelict...." "Shut up!" Fury rose in Gray, hotter than the boiling springs that ran p. 57 from the Sunside to water the valleys. He hated Mercury. He hated John Moulton and his daughter Jill, who had conceived this plan of building a new world for the destitute and desperate veterans of the Second Interplanetary War. "I've had enough 'unselfish service'," he whispered. "I'm serving myself from now on." Escape. That was all he wanted. Escape from these stifling valleys, from the snarl of the wind in the barren crags that towered higher than Everest into airless space. Escape from the surveillance of the twenty guards, the forced companionship of the ninety-nine other veteran-convicts. Wade poked at the furrows between the sturdy hybrid tubers. "It ain't possible, kid. Not even for 'Duke' Gray, the 'light-fingered genius who held the Interstellar Police at a standstill for five years'." He laughed. "I read your publicity." Gray stroked slow, earth-stained fingers over his sleek cap of yellow p. 58 hair. "You think so?" he asked softly. Dio the Martian came down the furrow, his lean, wiry figure silhouetted against the upper panorama of the valley; the neat rows of vegetables and the green riot of Venusian wheat, dotted with toiling men and their friendly guards. Dio's green, narrowed eyes studied Gray's hard face. "What's the matter, Gray? Trying to start something?" "Suppose I were?" asked Gray silkily. Dio was the unofficial leader of the convict-veterans. There was about his thin body and hatchet face some of the grim determination that had made the Martians cling to their dying world and bring life to it again. "You volunteered, like the rest of us," said the Martian. "Haven't you the guts to stick it?" "The hell I volunteered! The IPA sent me. And what's it to you?" "Only this." Dio's green eyes were slitted and ugly. "You've only been here a month. The rest of us came nearly a year ago—because we wanted to. We've worked like slaves, because we wanted to. In three weeks the crops will be in. The Moulton Project will be self-supporting. Moulton will get his permanent charter, and we'll be on our way. "There are ninety-nine of us, Gray, who want the Moulton Project to succeed. We know that that louse Caron of Mars doesn't want it to, since pitchblende was discovered. We don't know whether you're working for him or not, but you're a troublemaker. "There isn't to be any trouble, Gray. We're not giving the Interplanetary Prison Authority any excuse to revoke its decision and give Caron of Mars a free hand here. We'll see to anyone who tries it. Understand?" Mel Gray took one slow step forward, but Ward's sharp, "Stow it! A guard," stopped him. The Martian worked back up the furrow. The guard, reassured, strolled back up the valley, squinting at the jagged streak of pale-grey sky that was going black as low clouds formed, only a few hundred feet above the copper cables that ran from cliff to cliff high over their heads. "Another storm," growled Ward. "It gets worse as Mercury enters perihelion. Lovely world, ain't it?" "Why did you volunteer?" asked Gray, picking up his hoe. Ward shrugged. "I had my reasons." Gray voiced the question that had troubled him since his transfer. "There were hundreds on the waiting list to replace the man who died. Why did they send me, instead?" "Some fool blunder," said Ward carelessly. And then, in the same casual tone, "You mean it, about escaping?" Gray stared at him. "What's it to you?" Ward moved closer. "I can help you?" A stab of mingled hope and wary suspicion transfixed Gray's heart. Ward's dark face grinned briefly into his, with a flash of secretive black eyes, and Gray was conscious of distrust. "What do you mean, help me?" Dio was working closer, watching them. The first growl of thunder rattled against the cliff faces. It was dark now, the pink flames of the Dark-side aurora visible beyond the valley mouth. "I've got—connections," returned Ward cryptically. "Interested?" Gray hesitated. There was too much he couldn't understand. Moreover, he was a lone wolf. Had been since the Second Interplanetary War wrenched him from the quiet backwater of his country home an eternity of eight years before and hammered him into hardness—a cynic who trusted nobody and nothing but Mel 'Duke' Gray. "If you have connections," he said slowly, "why don't you use 'em yourself?" "I got my reasons." Again that secretive grin. "But it's no hide off you, p. 59 is it? All you want is to get away." That was true. It would do no harm to hear what Ward had to say. Lightning burst overhead, streaking down to be caught and grounded by the copper cables. The livid flare showed Dio's face, hard with worry and determination. Gray nodded. "Tonight, then," whispered Ward. "In the barracks." Out from the cleft where Mel Gray worked, across the flat plain of rock stripped n***d by the wind that raved across it, lay the deep valley that sheltered the heart of the Moulton Project. Hot springs joined to form a steaming river. Vegetation grew savagely under the huge sun. The air, kept at almost constant temperature by the blanketing effect of the hot springs, was stagnant and heavy. But up above, high over the copper cables that crossed every valley where men ventured, the eternal wind of Mercury screamed and snarled between the n***d cliffs. Three concrete domes crouched on the valley floor, housing barracks, tool-shops, kitchens, store-houses, and executive quarters, connected by underground passages. Beside the smallest dome, joined to it by a heavily barred tunnel, was an insulated hangar, containing the only space ship on Mercury. In the small dome, John Moulton leaned back from a pile of reports, took a pinch of Martian snuff, sneezed lustily, and said. "Jill, I think we've done it." The grey-eyed, black-haired young woman turned from the quartzite window through which she had been watching the gathering storm overhead. The thunder from other valleys reached them as a dim barrage which, at this time of Mercury's year, was never still. "I don't know," she said. "It seems that nothing can happen now, and yet.... It's been too easy." "Easy!" snorted Moulton. "We've broken our backs fighting these valleys. And our nerves, fighting time. But we've licked 'em!" He rose, shaggy grey hair tousled, grey eyes alight. "I told the IPA those men weren't criminals. And I was right. They can't deny me the charter now. No matter how much Caron of Mars would like to get his claws on this radium." He took Jill by the shoulders and shook her, laughing. "Three weeks, girl, that's all. First crops ready for harvest, first pay-ore coming out of the mines. In three weeks my permanent charter will have to be granted, according to agreement, and then.... "Jill," he added solemnly, "we're seeing the birth of a world." "That's what frightens me." Jill glanced upward as the first flare of lightning struck down, followed by a crash of thunder that shook the dome. "So much can happen at a birth. I wish the three weeks were over!" "Nonsense, girl! What could possibly happen?" She looked at the copper cables, burning with the electricity running along them, and thought of the one hundred and twenty-two souls in that narrow Twilight Belt—with the fierce heat of the Sunside before them and the spatial cold of the Shadow side at their backs, fighting against wind and storm and heat to build a world to replace the ones the War had taken from them. "So much could happen," she whispered. "An accident, an escape...." The inter-dome telescreen buzzed its signal. Jill, caught in a queer mood of premonition, went to it. The face of Dio the Martian appeared on the screen, still wet and dirty from the storm-soaked fields, disheveled from his battle across the plain in the chaotic winds. "I want to see you, Miss Moulton," he said. "There's something funny I think you ought to know." "Of course," said Jill, and met her p. 60 father's eyes. "I think we'll see, now, which one of us is right." The barracks were quiet, except for the mutter of distant thunder and the heavy breathing of exhausted men. Tom Ward crouched in the darkness by Mel Gray's bunk. "You ain't gonna go soft at the last minute, are you?" he whispered. "Because I can't afford to take chances." "Don't worry," Gray returned grimly. "What's your proposition?" "I can give you the combination to the lock of the hangar passage. All you have to do is get into Moulton's office, where the passage door is, and go to it. The ship's a two-seater. You can get her out of the valley easy." Gray's eyes narrowed in the dark. "What's the catch?" "There ain't none. I swear it." "Look, Ward. I'm no fool. Who's behind this, and why?" "That don't make no difference. All you want ... ow!" Gray's fingers had fastened like steel claws on his wrist. "I get it, now," said Gray slowly. "That's why I was sent here. Somebody wanted me to make trouble for Moulton." His fingers tightened agonizingly, and his voice sank to a slow drawl. "I don't like being a pawn in somebody else's chess game." "Okay, okay! It ain't my fault. Lemme go." Ward rubbed his bruised wrist. "Sure, somebody—I ain't sayin' who—sent you here, knowin' you'd want to escape. I'm here to help you. You get free, I get paid, the Big Boy gets what he wants. Okay?" Gray was silent, scowling in the darkness. Then he said. "All right. I'll take a chance." "Then listen. You tell Moulton you have a complaint. I'll...." Light flooded the dark as the door clanged open. Ward leaped like a startled rabbit, but the light speared him, held him. Ward felt a pulse of excitement beat up in him. The long ominous shadows of the guards raised elongated guns. The barracks stirred and muttered, like a vast aviary waking. "Ward and Gray," said one of the guards. "Moulton wants you." Gray rose from his bunk with the lithe, delicate grace of a cat. The monotony of sleep and labor was ended. Something had broken. Life was once again a moving thing. John Moulton sat behind the untidy desk. Dio the Martian sat grimly against the wall. There was a guard beside him, watching. Mel Gray noted all this as he and Ward came in. But his cynical blue eyes went beyond, to a door with a ponderous combination lock. Then they were attracted by something else—the tall, slim figure standing against the black quartz panes of the far wall. It was the first time he had seen Jill Moulton. She looked the perfect sober apostle of righteousness he'd learned to mock. And then he saw the soft cluster of black curls, the curve of her throat above the dark dress, the red lips that balanced her determined jaw and direct grey eyes. Moulton spoke, his shaggy head hunched between his shoulders. "Dio tells me that you, Gray, are not a volunteer." "Tattletale," said Gray. He was gauging the distance to the hangar door, the positions of the guards, the time it would take to spin out the combination. And he knew he couldn't do it. "What were you and Ward up to when the guards came?" "I couldn't sleep," said Gray amiably. "He was telling me bedtime stories." Jill Moulton was lovely, he couldn't deny that. Lovely, but not soft. She gave him an idea.