Public-domain ebook
A Coffin for Jacob
Language: en348 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Science Fiction·Science-Fiction & Fantasy·Adventure
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #51203.
The opening · free to read
He thought, I don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.
"It is deal, monsieur? Five dollars or twenty keelis for visit Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams--"
"I'm not buying."
The dirty-faced kid shrugged. "Then I show you to good table,--_tres bien_. I do not charge you, senor."
The boy grabbed his hand. Because Ben could think of no reason for resisting, he followed. They plunged into shifting layers of smoke and through the drone of alcohol-cracked voices.
They passed the bar with its line of lean-featured, slit-eyed Earthmen--merchant spacemen.
They wormed down a narrow aisle flanked by booths carved from Venusian marble that jutted up into the semi-darkness like fog-blanketed tombstones.
Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO_{2}-breathing Venusians, the first he'd ever seen.
They were smoky gray, scaly, naked giants, toads in human shape. They stood solitary and motionless, aloof, their green-lidded eyes unblinking. They certainly didn't look like telepaths, as Ben had heard they were, but the thought sent a fresh rivulet of fear down his spine.
Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club against the stone booths.
Keep walking, Ben told himself. You look the same as anyone else here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.
The officer passed. Ben breathed easier.
"Here we are, monsieur," piped the Martian boy. "A tres fine table. Close in the shadows."
Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows? Frowning, he sat down--he and the dead man.
He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.
The Martians were fragile, doll-like creatures with heads too large for their spindly bodies. Their long fingers played upon the strings of their cirillas or crawled over the holes of their flutes like spider legs. Their tune was sad. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and forgotten grandeur.
For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead man. He thought, What are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world? Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me, felt the challenge of new worlds?
He sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the faces of the Inn's other occupants.
You've got to find him, he thought. You've got to find the man with the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.
His body was buried now--probably in the silent gray wastes outside Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a part of Ben as sight in his eyes.
Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips spitting whiskey-slurred curses.
Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle from a corner of the gaping mouth.
You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a memory that has burned into your mind.
It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate. He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.
"Spacemen," he muttered, "are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you see's spacemen."
He was a neatly dressed civilian.
Ben smiled. "If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here."
"The name's Cobb." The man hiccoughed. "Spacemen in their white monkey suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a little tin god." He downed a shot of whiskey.
Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white, crimson-braided uniform of the Odyssey's junior astrogation officer. He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.
He'd sought long for that key.
At the age of five--perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents' death in a recent strato-jet crash--he'd spent hours watching the night sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his collection of astronomy and rocketry books.
At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space.
And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the _Odyssey_--the first ship, it was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps beyond.
Cobb was persistent: "Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth. What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?"
The guy's drunk, Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three stools down the bar.
Cobb followed. "You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like people to call you a sucker."
Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and held him there.
"Thas what you are--a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!"
Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and without warning, it welled up into savage fury.
His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of life.
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