No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories

  Twisting around, Jeff lined his sights between the porch railing posts and fired. The runner staggered drunkenly, came to his knees in a slashing path of lamplight that spewed from the restaurant.

  The ponies were snorting, rearing and jerking at their ties. The Silver Dollar’s batwing doors crashed open under the weight of rushing men. The piano stopped abruptly.

  Jeff wrenched his foot free of the broken step, the step that had broken under him that afternoon. A broken step, he knew, that probably had saved his life. For it he hadn’t stumbled when he did, the killer’s bullet would have found him.

  The man on his knees in front of the restaurant was leveling his gun. It bellowed and the slug raked across Jeff’s ribs with a blow that numbed his side.

  Behind Jeff a sixgun crashed and the kneeling man tipped over, arms outflung, body bent at an awkward angle.

  Jeff whirled, grabbed the arm that held the smoking gun and twisted hard. The weapon dropped.

  “Someone swiped my shooting iron,” wailed a voice. “Snatched it plumb away from me. Just wait until I get my hands …”

  “It’s on the ground,” Jeff said tersely. “Pick it up.”

  He spoke to the man he held. “Right nice of you to save my life.”

  Slemp squirmed in his grasp, terror on his face. “So you fixed it up,” said Jeff. “You had him planted here. I might have known when I saw him in there with you. One of your spies. Afraid of me, so you decided to scratch me out.”

  Slemp tried to speak, but Jeff snarled at him.

  “Shut up!”

  Three men came back from the restaurant, carrying the limp body.

  “It’s Buck,” said one of them. “He’s deader than a door nail.”

  They laid him on the porch and someone brought a blanket to throw over him.

  Jeff looked up and saw Owen standing on the porch, staring down at him and Slemp.

  “I see,” said Owen, “that you’re taking your new job right serious.”

  “I aim to,” Jeff told him. He nodded at the blanket covered form. “One of your men, wasn’t he?”

  Owen shook his head. “Must be something wrong, Jones. Buck never would have climbed you.”

  “He did, though.”

  “And,” said Owen, callously, “he got what was coming to him.”

  Owen turned away and headed for the doors. “Drinks on the house,” he called.

  The men trooped in to line up against the bar.

  “Get going,” Jeff told Slemp.

  Together they climbed the steps and went through the doors, stopped just inside of them.

  Everyone else was at the bar … except one man. The drunk still slept at the table, hat still canted on its brim. He snored and the snore made his whiskers flutter as if there were a wind.

  “Owen,” said Jeff and his voice, edged with steel, cut through the voices at the bar, brought every man around, clapped the place in silence.

  For a long minute the silence held, then Owen stepped out of the line.

  “Yes, Jones, what is it?”

  Jeff twisted his arm and sent the banker spinning into the center of the room. Off balance, Slemp tried to right himself, skidded and slipped, sat down hard and slid.

  “Slemp here wants to ask you about some money,” said Jeff. “The mortgage money that never got to him.”

  “He’s crazy,” screamed the sitting Slemp. “He don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “I had a brother Dan,” said Jeff. “He started for Cactus City to pay up his mortgage. He never got here. He …”

  At the bar a man moved swiftly, his arms a blur of motion, his gun a streaking thing that glinted in the light.

  Jeff’s hands pistoned for his Colts, but he knew he’d be too late. The play had failed … it never had a chance ….

  A crashing gun bark jarred the room and the man at the bar huddled forward, twisting, fighting to keep his feet. He staggered out into the room, his guns dropped from his hand and he sat down limply, one shoulder oozing red.

  The drunk, drunk no longer, crouched behind his table, two guns out. One of them smoking.

  The crowd at the bar surged forward, but Jeff swept the gun barrels at them.

  “Stay where you are,” he yelled. “And reach for the sky.”

  They halted, retreated until their backs were against the bar. Slowly their hands came up.

  “Some of you hombres are all right,” said Jeff, “and some of you ain’t. I ain’t got no way of knowing. The ones that move, I’ll figure that they ain’t.”

  The drunk spoke slowly, almost conversationally. “You take them from that side, kid, and I’ll take them from the other.”

  “Dan!” yelled Jeff.

  “Yeah, it’s me, all right. But keep your eyes peeled. That buckaroo on the floor must be one of them that dry gulched me that day. Can’t explain what he did no other way.”

  The blood drummed through Jeff’s head, but he kept his eyes straight ahead. Dan was alive … alive and in this room with him. The two of them putting down the chips against Slemp and Owen.

  The tableau held. The line of men against the bar were still and silent, hands high in the air. Slemp still on the floor, Owen standing just a few feet out in the room. The wounded man slumped on the floor, head hanging, hand clawing at his shoulder.

  But it would have to break. It couldn’t last, Jeff knew.

  He stared at the faces staring at him. Jim Churchill was the only one he knew. But there must be others here who were ready to fight Slemp and Owen.

  The wounded man was babbling. “I was sure I got him. It was dark, but I was sure. His horse ran and it was dark. The money was in the saddle bags and I didn’t go back to look. I was …”

  “Shut up, you fool,” yelled Owen.

  “So,” snarled Jeff, “you don’t want him to talk.”

  “Men,” yelled Owen, “are you going to stand for this? Are you going to let this hombre get away with it?”

  A few of those at the bar stirred uneasily, but no one went for his guns.

  Churchill, arms still high, moved out.

  “Better explain yourself, Jones,” he snapped.

  “Simple,” said Jeff. “Owen and his gang here has been killing off the ranchers when they’re coming in to pay their loans. Owen gets the money and Slemp gets the land.”

  “I never had a thing to do with it,” yelled Slemp. “It was Owen thought it up …”

  The line at the bar exploded. A gun roared and a bullet thudded into the door post behind Jeff’s head.

  Owen was charging and Jeff brought up a gun, pressed the trigger. But the big man came on.

  Shots were hammering and a lamp crashed, spraying oil across the floor.

  Jeff leaped to meet Owen’s charge, but his foot slipped in the pool of oil and his hands slid off Owen’s body. The batwings flapped as if hit by a sudden wind and the man was gone.

  A bullet thudded into the floor and flying splinters stabbed at Jeff’s face. A gun crashed directly above him. One of his own guns was lost, but he still had the other. With a heave he gained his feet and plunged for the door.

  Owen was on his hands and knees in the dust of the street, like a trapped animal, with one foot fast in the broken bottom step.

  With a yell, Jeff launched himself in a flying tackle even as Owen’s foot came free.

  Warned by the yell, Owen twisted to meet him, flung up an arm that broke the swing of Jeff’s gun. Thudding into the man, Jeff felt his arm go numb, felt the gun fly from suddenly limp fingers.

  A fist caught him in the jaw, rocked him back against the porch. In front of him, Owen was scrambling to his feet, hands reaching for the guns that dangled from his hips.

  Desperately, Jeff leaped, good arm swinging. The blow caught Owen in the side of the head and staggered hi
m. Jeff followed, left fist punching as Owen clawed for steel.

  One of Owen’s guns was out and coming up. Jeff swung again, stepping in fast, putting every ounce of power into the blow. It connected with a thud that snapped Owen’s head back between his shoulders, sent him rocking on his heels against the hitching rail. A gun blasted and Jeff felt a sharp snarl of pain slash across his leg.

  Owen was against the rail, groggy, weaving. Jeff stepped forward and his leg screamed with agony. The gun came up again, shaky, uncertain.

  Jeff’s fist lashed out, straight to the chin. Owen slumped like a sack, gun tumbling from his hand.

  Hanging onto the railing, Jeff stooped and picked it up, straightened up again, still clutching the rail. He couldn’t move, he knew. He had to hang to that rail.

  He lifted his head, stared dully at the Silver Dollar. The place was a hum of voices, but there was no shooting. Light still spilled from the windows.

  His head spun and he fought to keep his grip. But the railing seemed to writhe and twist and his hand slipped off. He knew that he was plunging to the street, flat on his face.

  He awoke choking and coughing, clawing at his throat. Through bleary eyes he saw a glass half full of whisky in a fist before his face.

  He fought his way to a sitting posture and looked around. Men were standing in a circle, among them a man with a bearded face.

  “How about it, Dan?” he asked, his voice raspy.

  “It’s all right, kid,” said Dan. “Slemp coughed up his guts. We got enough evidence to hang them all.”

  “But you,” asked Jeff. “How did you get away with it?”

  Dan laughed. “Slemp was the only one that ever saw me close. I was too busy on the ranch to spend much time in town. And then the beard fooled them, would have fooled even Slemp. And no one pays much attention to a floating drunk. I figured what the setup was and I meant to get the evidence. But you almost upset my plans. When you came barging in this afternoon, I nearly came dealing myself a hand when Churchill jumped you …”

  “Lucky thing for me,” said Churchill, “that you didn’t.”

  “Only thing,” said Dan, “I wasn’t even sure, myself. That scar of yours.”

  Jeff’s hand went to his cheek, “Got it the week after you left home,” he said. “Bronc bucked me off into a barbed wire fence.”

  Message from Mars

  Originally named “Martian Lilies,” this story, which was apparently written in late 1939 or early 1940, was rejected by Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and another magazine not named in Cliff’s journals before being accepted by Planet Stories late in 1942. The magazine paid Cliff a hundred dollars, and the story appeared its fall 1943 issue. In a way, readers can view this story as a reversal of the plot of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, as well as an extension of the idea underlying the Superman comic books (I know Cliff read Wells, but there’s no evidence that he ever read the Superman comics). But the most important thing about “Message from Mars” is that it contains, appropriately, the seeds of the later Simak novel All Flesh Is Grass.

  —dww

  I

  “You’re crazy, man,” snapped Steven Alexander, “you can’t take off for Mars alone!”

  Scott Nixon thumped the desk in sudden irritation.

  “Why not?” he shouted. “One man can run a rocket. Jack Riley’s sick and there are no other pilots here. The rocket blasts in fifteen minutes and we can’t wait. This is the last chance. The only chance we’ll have for months.”

  Jerry Palmer, sitting in front of the massive radio, reached for a bottle of Scotch and slopped a drink into the tumbler at his elbow.

  “Hell, Doc,” he said, “let him go. It won’t make any difference. He won’t reach Mars. He’s just going out in space to die like all the rest of them.”

  Alexander snapped savagely at him. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You drink too much.”

  “Forget it, Doc,” said Scott. “He’s telling the truth. I won’t get to Mars, of course. You know what they’re saying down in the base camp, don’t you? About the bridge of bones. Walking to Mars over a bridge of bones.”

  The old man stared at him. “You have lost faith? You don’t think you’ll go to Mars?”

  Scott shook his head. “I haven’t lost my faith. Someone will get there … sometime. But it’s too soon yet. Look at that tablet, will you!”

  He waved his hand at a bronze plate set into the wall.

  “The roll of honor,” said Scott, bitterly. “Look at the names. You’ll have to buy another soon. There won’t be room enough.”

  One Nixon already was on that scroll of bronze. Hugh Nixon, fifty-fourth from the top. And under that the name of Harry Decker, the man who had gone out with him.

  The radio blurted suddenly at them, jabbering, squealing, howling in anguish.

  Scott stiffened, ears tensed as the code sputtered across millions of miles. But it was the same old routine. The same old message, repeated over and over again … the same old warning hurled out from the ruddy planet.

  “No. No. No come. Danger.”

  Scott turned toward the window, stared up into the sky at the crimson eye of Mars.

  What was the use of keeping hope alive? Hope that Hugh might have reached Mars, that someday the Martian code would bring some word of him.

  Hugh had died … like all the rest of them. Like those whose names were graven in the bronze there on the wall. The maw of space had swallowed him. He had flown into the face of silence and the silence was unbroken.

  The door of the office creaked open, letting in a gust of chilly air. Jimmy Baldwin shut the door behind him and looked at them vacantly.

  “Nice night to go to Mars,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t be up here, Jimmy,” said Alexander gently. “You should be down at the base, tending to your flowers.”

  “There’re lots of flowers on Mars,” said Jimmy. “Maybe someday I’ll go to Mars and see.”

  “Wait until somebody else goes first,” said Palmer bitterly.

  Jimmy turned about, hesitantly, like a man who had a purpose but had forgotten what it was. He moved slowly toward the door and opened it.

  “I got to go,” he said.

  The door closed heavily but the chill did not vanish from the room. For it wasn’t the chill of the mountain’s peak, but another kind of chill … a chill that had walked in with Jimmy Baldwin and now refused to leave.

  Palmer tipped the bottle, sloshed the whiskey in the glass.

  “The greatest pilot that ever lived,” he said. “Now look at him!”

  “He still holds the record,” Alexander reminded the radio operator. “Eight times to the Moon and still alive.”

  The accident had happened as Jimmy’s ship was approaching Earth on that eighth return trip. A tiny meteor had struck the hull, drilling a sharp-cut hole. It had struck Andy Mason, Jimmy’s best friend, squarely between the eyes.

  The cabin had been filled with the scream of escaping air, had turned cold with the deadly breath of space and frost crystals had danced in front of Jimmy’s eyes.

  Somehow Jimmy had patched the hole in the hull, had reached Earth in a smashing rocket drive, knowing he had little air, that every minute was a borrowed eternity.

  Most pilots would have killed themselves or blown up their ships in that reckless race for Earth, but Jimmy, ace of all the space-men of his day, had made it.

  But he had walked from the ship with a blank face and babbling lips. He still lived at the rocket camp because it was home to him. He puttered among his flowers. He watched the rockets come and go without a flutter of expression. And everyone was kind to him, for in his face they read a fate that might be theirs.

  “All of us are crazy,” said Scott. “Every one of us. Myself included. That’s why I’m blasting off alone.”

/>   “I refuse to let you go,” said Alexander firmly.

  Scott rested his knuckles on the desk. “You can’t stop me. I have my orders to make the trip. Whether I go alone or with an assistant pilot makes no difference. That rocket blasts on time, and I’m in it when it goes.”

  “But it’s foolishness,” protested Alexander. “You’ll go space-mad. Think of the loneliness!”

  “Think of the coordinates,” snapped Scott. “Delay the blast-off and you have to work out a set of new ones. Days of work and then it’ll be too late. Mars will be too far away.”

  Alexander spread his hands. “All right then. I hope you make it.”

  Scott turned away but Alexander called him back.

  “You’re sure of the routine?”

  Scott nodded. He knew the routine by heart. So many hours out to the Moon, landing on the Moon to take on extra fuel, taking off for Mars at an exact angle at a certain minute.

  “I’ll come out and see you off,” said Alexander. He heaved himself up and slid into a heavy coat.

  Palmer shouted after Scott. “So long, big boy. It was nice knowing you.”

  Scott shrugged. Palmer was a little drunk and very bitter. He’d watched them go too long. His nerves were wearing out.

  Stars shone like hard, bright jewels in the African sky. A sharp wind blew over the summit of Mt. Kenya, a wind that whined among the ice-bound rocks and bit deep into the flesh. Far below blazed the lights of the base camp, hundreds of feet down the slope from the main rocket camp here atop the mountain set squarely on the Earth’s equator.

  The rasping voice of a radio newscaster came from the open door of the machine shop.

  “New York,” shrieked the announcer. “Austin Gordon, famous African explorer, announced this afternoon he will leave soon for the Congo valley, where he will investigate reports of a strange metallic city deep in the interior. Natives, bringing reports of the discovery out of the jungle, claim the city is inhabited by strange metallic insects.”

  Someone slammed the door and the voice was cut off.

  Scott hunched into the wind to light a cigarette.