Read Ebook: The call from beyond by Simak Clifford D Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 445 lines and 14483 words, and 9 pages

"You see, Mr. Best," the man declared. "I--"

"West," said West. "Not Best. West."

The man did not seem to notice. "I'm going to die, you understand. Any minute, maybe. Got a liver and heart and either one could kill me. Drinking does that to you. Never used to drink. Got into the habit when I was sampling all these bottles. Got a taste for it. Then there wasn't anything to do--"

He hunched forward.

"Promise you will take Annabelle," he croaked.

Annabelle tittered at West, slobber drooling from her mouth.

"But I can't take her back," West protested, "unless I know where she came from. You have to tell me that."

The man waggled a finger. "From far away," he croaked, "and yet not so very far. Not so very far if you know the way."

West eyed Annabelle with the gorge rising in his throat.

"I will take her," he said. "But you have to tell me where."

"Thank you, Guest," said the man. He lifted the bottle and let it gurgle.

"Not Guest," said West, patiently. "My name is--"

The man toppled forward off the bed, sprawled across the floor. The bottle rolled crazily, spilling liquor in sporadic gushes.

West leaped forward, knelt beside the man and lifted him. The whiskers moved and a whisper came from their tangled depths, a gasping whisper that was scarcely more than a waning breath.

"Tell Louis that his painting--"

"Louis?" yelled West. "Louis who? What about--"

The whisper came again. "Tell him ... someday ... he'll paint a wrong place and then...."

Gently West laid the man back on the floor and stepped away. The whisky bottle still rocked to and fro beneath a chair where it had come to rest.

Something glinted at the head of the cot and West walked to where it hung. It was a watch, a shining watch, polished with years of care. It swung slowly from a leather thong tied to the rod that formed the cot's head, where a man could reach out in the dark and read it.

West took it in his hand and turned it over, saw the engraving that ran across its back. Bending low, he read the inscription in the feeble light.

To Walter J. Darling, from class of '16, Mars Polytech.

West straightened, understanding and disbelief stirring in his mind.

Walter J. Darling, that huddle on the floor? Walter J. Darling, one of the solar system's greatest biologists, dead in this filthy hut? Darling, teacher for years at Mars Polytechnical Institute, that shrunken, liquor-sodden corpse in shoddy underwear?

West wiped his forehead with the back of his space-gloved hand. Darling had been a member of that mysterious government commission assigned to the cold laboratories on Pluto, sent there to develop artificial hormones aimed at controlled mutation of the human race. A mission that had been veiled in secrecy from the first because it was feared, and rightly so, that revelation of its purpose might lead to outraged protests from a humanity that could not imagine why it should be improved biologically.

A mission, thought West, that had set out in mystery and ended in mystery, mystery that had sent whispers winging through the solar system. Shuddery whispers.

Louis? That would be Louis Nevin, another member of the Pluto commission. He was the man Darling had tried to tell about just before he died.

And Nevin must still be out here on Pluto, must still be alive despite the message that had come to Earth.

But the painting didn't fit. Nevin wasn't an artist. He was a biologist, scarcely second to Darling.

The message of three years before had been a phony, then. There were men still on the planet.

And that meant, West told himself bitterly, that his own plan had gone awry. For Pluto was the only place in the Solar System where there would be food and shelter and to which no one would ever come.

He remembered how he had planned it all so carefully ... how it had seemed a perfect answer. There would be many years' supply of food stacked in the storerooms, there would be comfortable living quarters, and there would be tools and equipment should he ever need them. And, of course, the Thing, whatever it might be. The horror that had closed the planet, that had set the space patrol to guard the planet's loneliness.

But West had never been too concerned with what he might find on Pluto, for whatever it might be, it could be no worse than the bitterness that was his on Earth.

There was something going on at the Pluto laboratories. Something that the government didn't know about or that the government had suppressed along with that now infamous report of three years before.

Something that Darling could have told him had he wanted to ... or had he been able. But now Walter J. Darling was past all telling. West would have to find out by himself.

West stepped to where he lay, lifted him to the cot and covered him with a tattered blanket.

Perched on the cot head, Annabelle chattered and giggled and drooled.

"Come here, you," said West. "Come on over here."

Annabelle came, slowly and coyly. West lifted her squeamishly, thrust her into an outer pocket and zipped it shut. He started toward the doorway.

On the way out he picked the empty bottle from the floor, added it to the pyramid outside.

The White Singer

West's craft fled like a silvery shadow between the towering mountain peaks shielding the only valley on Pluto that had ever known the tread of Man.

Coasting in on silent motors in the shadow of the planet, he had eluded the patrol. Beyond the mountains he had thrown in the motors, had braked the plunging ship almost to a crawl, taking the chance the flare of the rockets might be seen by any of the patrol far out in space.

And now, speed reduced, dropping in a long slant toward the glass-smooth landing field, he huddled over the controls, keyed to a free-fall landing, always dangerous at best. But it would be as dangerous, he sensed, to advertise his coming with another rocket blast. The field was long and smooth. If he hit it right and not too far out, there would be plenty of room.

The almost nonexistent atmosphere was a point in favor. There were no eddies, no currents of air to deflect the ship, send it into a spin or a dangerous wobble.

Off to the right he caught a flash of light and his mind clicked the split-second answer that it must be the laboratory.

Then the ship was down, pancaking, hissing along the landing strip, friction gripping the hull. It stopped just short of a jumbled pile of rock and West let out his breath, felt his heart take up the beat again. A few feet more....

Locking the controls, he hung the key around his neck, pulled down the visor of his space gear and let himself out of the ship.

Across the field glowed the lights of the laboratory. He had not been mistaken, then. He had seen the lights ... and men were here. Or could he be mistaken? Those lights would have continued to function even without attention. The fact that they were shining in the building was no reason to conclude that men also were there.

It hadn't gone, of course, but that didn't matter.

"A symbol," West said to himself.

That was what it was ... a symbol and a dream.

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