Short Fiction - Ray Bradbury (short story to read .TXT) 📗

radio-room, Logan touched studs, raised a mike to his lips and said:

“Beam to Mars. Beam to Mars. Morgue Ship of Earth calling. Mars Beam answer.”

After an interval, Mars gave answer. Logan said:

“I’ve just picked up the body of a 51 Circle Scientist. He’s been resuscitated. Give me your fleet commander. I got things to talk over with him.” Logan smiled. “Oh, hello, commander!”

Half an hour later, the discussions were over, the plans made. Logan hung up, satisfied. Brandon looked at him as if he couldn’t believe he was serious.

Back down in the control room, Logan set a course, and then forced Brandon to get the body ready. He bragged about the deal. “A half ton of radium, Brandy. Not bad, eh? Good pay. More than Earth’d ever give me for my routine duty.”

Brandon shuddered. “You fool. The Martians will kill us.”

“Uh-uh.” Logan pantomimed him into moving the body onto a rollered table and taking it to the emergency life-craft airlock. “I’m not that dumb. I’m having you wire this emergency lifeboat with explosive. We collect the minerals first. We blow up the body if the Martians act funny. We make them wait until we’ve collected our half and gotten five hours’ start toward Earth before we allow them to pick up the body. Nice, huh?”

Brandon swayed over the task of wiring the lifeboat with explosive. “You’re cutting your own throat. Handing over a weapon like that to the Martian enemy.”

It was no again from Logan. “After the Martians pick up the body and we’re safely on our way home to Earth, I press a button and the whole damn thing blows up. They call it double-crossing.”

“Destroy the body?”

“Hell, yes. Think I want a weapon like that turned over to the enemy? Guh!”

“The war’ll go on for years.”

“So Earth’ll wind up winning, anyhow. We’re getting along, slow but sure. And when the war’s over, I got a load of radium to set myself up in business and a big future in front of me.”

“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 back 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