Skeleton Crew

  One of the androids waved a sampler wand at him. Shapiro batted it away. He fell on his knees in front of the captain and embraced the treads which had replaced the captain's dead legs.

  "The dunes ... Rand ... no water ... alive ... hypnotized him ... dronehead world ... I ... thank God ... "

  A steel tentacle whipped around Shapiro and yanked him away on his gut. Dry sand whispered underneath him like laughter.

  "It's okay," the captain said. "Bey-at shel! Me! Me! Gat!"

  The android dropped Shapiro and backed away, clittering distractedly to itself.

  "All this way for a fucking Fed!" the captain exclaimed bitterly.

  Shapiro wept. It hurt, not just in his head, but in his liver.

  "Dud! Gee-yat! Gat! Water-for-him-Cry!"

  The man who had been in the lead tossed him a nippled low-grav bottle. Shapiro upended it and sucked greedily, spilling crystal-cold water into his mouth, down his chin, in dribbles that darkened his tunic, which had bleached to the color of bone. He choked, vomited, then drank again.

  Dud and the captain watched him closely. The androids clittered.

  At last Shapiro wiped his mouth and sat up. He felt both sick and well.

  "You Shapiro?" the captain asked.

  Shapiro nodded.

  "Clan affiliation?"

  "None."

  "ASN number?"

  "29."

  "Crew?"

  "Three. One dead. The other--Rand--up there." He pointed but did not look.

  The captain's face did not change. Dud's face did.

  "The beach got him," Shapiro said. He saw their questioning, veiled looks. "Shock ... maybe. He seems hypnotized. He keeps talking about the ... the Beach Boys ... never mind, you wouldn't know. He wouldn't drink or eat. He's bad off."

  "Dud. Take one of the andies and get him down from there." He shook his head. "Fed ship, Christ. No salvage."

  Dud nodded. A few moments later he was scrambling up the side of the dune with one of the andies. The andy looked like a twenty-year-old surfer who might make dope money on the side servicing bored widows, but his stride gave him away even more than the segmented tentacles which grew from his armpits. The stride, common to all androids, was the slow, reflective, almost painful stride of an aging English butler with hemorrhoids.

  There was a buzz from the captain's dashboard.

  "I'm here."

  "This is Gomez, Cap. We got a situation here. Compscan and surface telemetry show us a very unstable surface. There's no bedrock that we can targ. We're resting on our own burn, and right now that may be the hardest thing on the whole planet. Trouble is, the burn itself is starting to settle."

  "Recommendation?"

  "We ought to get out."

  "When?"

  "Five minutes ago."

  "You're a laugh riot, Gomez."

  The captain punched a button and the communicator went out.

  Shapiro's eyes were rolling. "Look, never mind Rand. He's had it."

  "I'm taking you both back," the captain said. "I got no salvage, but the Federation ought to pay something for the two of you ... not that either of you are worth much, as far as I can see. He's crazy and you're chickenshit."

  "No ... you don't understand. You--"

  The captain's cunning yellow eyes gleamed.

  "You got any contra?" he asked.

  "Captain ... look ... please--"

  "Because if you do, there's no sense just leaving it here. Tell me what it is and where it is. I'll split seventy-thirty. Standard salvor's fee. Couldn't do any better than that, hey? You--"

  The burn suddenly tilted beneath them. Quite noticeably tilted. A horn somewhere inside the trader began to blat with muffled regularity. The communicator on the captain's dashboard went off again.

  "There!" Shapiro screamed. "There, do you see what you're up against? You want to talk about contraband now? WE HAVE GOT TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!"

  "Shut up, handsome, or I'll have one of these guys sedate you," the captain said. His voice was serene but his eyes had changed. He thumbed the communicator.

  "Cap, I got ten degrees of tilt and we're getting more. The elevator's going down, but it's going on an angle. We've still got time, but not much. The ship's going to fall over."

  "The struts will hold her."

  "No, sir. Begging the captain's pardon, they won't."

  "Start firing sequences, Gomez."

  "Thank you, sir." The relief in Gomez's voice was unmistakable.

  Dud and the android were coming back down the flank of the dune. Rand wasn't with them. The andy fell further and further behind. And now a strange thing happened. The andy fell over on its face. The captain frowned. It did not fall as an andy is supposed to fall--which is to say, like a human being, more or less. It was as if someone had pushed over a mannequin in a department store. It fell over like that. Thump, and a little tan cloud of sand puffed up from around it.

  Dud went back and knelt by it. The andy's legs were still moving as if it dreamed, in the 1.5 million Freon-cooled micro-circuits that made up its mind, that it still walked. But the leg movements were slow and cracking. They stopped. Smoke began to come out of its pores and its tentacles shivered in the sand. It was gruesomely like watching a human die. A deep grinding came from inside it: Graaaagggg!

  "Full of sand," Shapiro whispered. "It's got Beach Boys religion. "

  The captain glanced at him impatiently. "Don't be ridiculous, man. That thing could walk through a sandstorm and not get a grain inside it."

  "Not on this world."

  The bum settled again. The trader was now clearly canted. There was a low groan as the struts took more weight.

  "Leave it!" the captain bawled at Dud. "Leave it, leave it! Gee-yat! Come-me for-Cry!"

  Dud came, leaving the andy to walk face-down in the sand.

  "What a balls-up," the captain muttered.

  He and Dud engaged in a conversation spoken entirely in a rapid pidgin dialect which Shapiro was able to follow to some degree. Dud told the captain that Rand had refused to come. The andy had tried to grab Rand, but with no force. Even then it was moving jerkily, and strange grating sounds were coming from inside it. Also, it had begun to recite a combination of galactic strip-mining coordinates and a catalogue of the captain's folk-music tapes. Dud himself had then closed with Rand. They had struggled briefly. The captain told Dud that if Dud had allowed a man who had been standing three days in the hot sun to get the better of him, that maybe he ought to get another First.

  Dud's face darkened with embarrassment, but his grave, concerned look never faltered. He slowly turned his head, revealing four deep furrows in his cheek. They were welling slowly.

  "Him-gat big indics," Dud said. "Strong-for-Cry. Him-gat for umby."

  "Umby-him for-Cry?" The captain was looking at Dud sternly.

  Dud nodded. "Umby. Beyat-shel. Umby-for-Cry."

  Shapiro had been frowning, conning his tired, frightened mind for that word. Now it came. Umby. It meant crazy. He's strong, for Christ's sake. Strong because he's crazy. He's got big ways, big force. Because he's crazy.

  Big ways ... or maybe it meant big waves. He wasn't sure. Either way it came to the same.

  Umby.

  The ground shifted underneath them again, and sand blew across Shapiro's boots.

  From behind them came the hollow ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud of the breather-tubes opening. Shapiro thought it one of the most lovely sounds he had ever heard in his life.

  The captain sat deep in thought, a weird centaur whose lower half was treads and plates instead of horse. Then he looked up and thumbed the communicator.

  "Gomez, send Excellent Montoya down here with a tranquilizer gun."

  "Acknowledged."

  The captain looked at Shapiro. "Now, on top of everything else, I've lost an android worth your salary for the next ten years. I'm pissed off. I mean to have your buddy."

  "Captain." Shapiro could not help licking his lips. He knew this
was a very ill-chosen thing to do. He did not want to appear mad, hysterical, or craven, and the captain had apparently decided he was all three. Licking his lips like that would only add to the impression ... but he simply couldn't help himself. "Captain, I cannot impress on you too strongly the need to get off this world as soon as poss--"

  "Can it, dronehead," the captain said, not unkindly.

  A thin scream rose from the top of the nearest dune.

  "Don't touch me! Don't come near me! Leave me alone! All of you!"

  "Big indics gat umby," Dud said gravely.

  "Ma-him, yeah-mon," the captain returned, and then turned to Shapiro. "He really is bad off, isn't he?"

  Shapiro shuddered. "You don't know. You just--"

  The burn settled again. The struts were groaning louder than ever. The communicator crackled. Gomez's voice was thin, a little unsteady.

  "We have to get out of here right now, Cap!"

  "All right." A brown man appeared on the gangway. He held a long pistol in one gloved hand. The captain pointed at Rand. "Ma-him, for-Cry. Can?"

  Excellent Montoya, Unperturbed by the tilting earth that was not earth but only sand fused to glass (and there were deep cracks running through it now, Shapiro saw), unbothered by the groaning struts or the eerie sight of an android that now appeared to be digging its own grave with its feet, studied Rand's thin figure for a moment.

  "Can," he said.

  "Gat! Gat-for-Cry!" The captain spat to one side. "Shoot his pecker off, I don't care," he said. "Just as long as he's still breathing when we ship."

  Excellent Montoya raised the pistol. The gesture was apparently two-thirds casual and one-third careless, but Shapiro, even in his state of near-panic, noted the way Montoya's head tilted to one side as he lined the barrel up. Like many in the clans, the gun would be nearly a part of him, like pointing his own finger.

  There was a hollow fooh! as he squeezed the trigger and the tranquilizer dart blew out of the barrel.

  A hand reached out of the dune and clawed it down.

  It was a large brown hand, wavery, made of sand. It simply reached up, in defiance of the wind, and smothered the momentary glitter of the dart. Then the sand fell back with a heavy thrrrrap. No hand. Impossible to believe there had been. But they had all seen it.

  "Giddy-hump," the captain said in an almost conversational voice.

  Excellent Montoya fell on his knees. "Aidy-May-for-Cry, bit-gat come! Saw-hoh got belly-gat-for-Cry!-"

  Numbly, Shapiro realized Montoya was saying a rosary in pidgin.

  Up on the dune, Rand was jumping up and down, shaking his fists at the sky, screeching thinly in triumph.

  A hand. It was a HAND. He's right; it's alive, alive, alive--

  "Indic!" the captain said sharply to Montoya. "Cannit! Gat!"

  Montoya shut up. His eyes touched on the capering figure of Rand and then he looked away. His face was full of superstitious horror nearly medieval in quality.

  "Okay," the captain said. "I've had enough. I quit. We're going."

  He shoved two buttons on his dashboard. The motor that should have swiveled him neatly around so he faced up the gangplank again did not hum; it squealed and grated. The captain cursed. The burn shifted again.

  "Captain!" Gomez. In a panic.

  The captain slammed in another button and the treads began to move backward up the gangplank.

  "Guide me," the captain said to Shapiro. "I got no fucking rearview mirror. It was a hand, wasn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "I want to get out of here," the captain said. "It's been fourteen years since I had a cock, but right now I feel like I'm pissing myself."

  Thrrap! A dune suddenly collapsed over the gangway. Only it wasn't a dune; it was an arm.

  "Fuck, oh fuck," the captain said.

  On his dune, Rand capered and screeched.

  Now the threads of the captain's lower half began to grind. The mini-tank of which the captain's head and shoulders were the turret now began to judder backward.

  "What--"

  The treads locked. Sand splurted out from between them.

  "Pick me up!" the captain bawled to the two remaining androids. "Now! RIGHT NOW!"

  Their tentacles curled around the tread sprockets as they picked him up--he looked ridiculously like a faculty member about to be tossed in a blanket by a bunch of roughhousing fraternity boys. He was thumbing the communicator.

  "Gomez! Final firing sequence! Now! Now!"

  The dune at the foot of the gangplank shifted. Became a hand. A large brown hand that began to scrabble up the incline.

  Shrieking, Shapiro bolted from that hand.

  Cursing, the captain was carried away from it.

  The gangplank was pulled up. The hand fell off and became sand again. The hatchway irised closed. The engines howled. No time for a couch; no time for anything like that. Shapiro dropped into a crash-fold position on the bulkhead and was promptly smashed flat by the acceleration. Before unconsciousness washed over him, it seemed he could feel sand grasping at the trader with muscular brown arms, straining to hold them down--

  Then they were up and away.

  Rand watched them go. He was sitting down. When the track of the trader's jets was at last gone from the sky, he turned his eyes out to the placid endlessness of the dunes.

  "We got a '34 wagon and we call it a woody," he croaked to the empty, moving sand. "It ain't very cherry; it's an oldy but a goody."

  Slowly, reflectively, he began to cram handful after handful of sand into his mouth. He swallowed ... swallowed ... swallowed. Soon his belly was a swollen barrel and sand began to drift over his legs.

  The Reaper's Image

  "We moved it last year, and quite an operation it was, too," Mr. Carlin said as they mounted the stairs. "Had to move it by hand, of course. No other way. We insured it against accident with Lloyd's before we even took it out of the case in the drawing room. Only firm that would insure for the sum we had in mind."

  Spangler said nothing. The man was a fool. Johnson Spangler had learned a long time ago that the only way to talk to a fool was to ignore him.

  "Insured it for a quarter of a million dollars," Mr. Carlin resumed when they reached the second-floor landing. His mouth quirked in a half-bitter, half-humorous line. "And a pretty penny it cost, too." He was a little man, not quite fat, with rimless glasses and a tanned bald head that shone like a varnished volleyball. A suit of armor, guarding the mahogany shadows of the second-floor corridor, stared at them impassively.

  It was a long corridor, and Spangler eyed the walls and hangings with a cool professional eye. Samuel Claggert had bought in copious quantities, but he had not bought well. Like so many of the self-made industry emperors of the late 1800's, he had been little more than a pawnshop rooter masquerading in collector's clothing, a connoisseur of canvas monstrosities, trashy novels and poetry collections in expensive cowhide bindings, and atrocious pieces of sculpture, all of which he considered Art.

  Up here the walls were hung--festooned was perhaps a better word--with imitation Moroccan drapes, numberless (and, no doubt, anonymous) madonnas holding numberless haloed babes while numberless angels flitted hither and thither in the background, grotesque scrolled candelabra, and one monstrous and obscenely ornate chandelier surmounted by a salaciously grinning nymphet.

  Of course the old pirate had come up with a few interesting items; the law of averages demanded it. And if the Samuel Claggert Memorial Private Museum (Guided Tours on the Hour--Admission $1.00 Adults, $.50 Children--nauseating) was 98 percent blatant junk, there was always that other two percent, things like the Coombs long rifle over the hearth in the kitchen, the strange little camera obscura in the parlor, and of course the--

  "The DeIver looking-glass was removed from downstairs after a rather unfortunate ... incident," Mr. Carlin said abruptly, motivated apparently by a ghastly glaring portrait of no one in particular at the base of the next staircase. "There had been others--harsh words, wild
statements--but this was an attempt to actually destroy the mirror. The woman, a Miss Sandra Bates, came in with a rock in her pocket. Fortunately her aim was bad and she only cracked a comer of the case. The mirror was unharmed. The Bates girl had a brother--"

  "No need to give me the dollar tour," Spangler said quietly. "I'm conversant with the history of the Delver glass."

  "Fascinating, isn't it?" Carlin cast him an odd, oblique look. "There was that English duchess in 1709 ... and the Pennsylvania rug merchant in 1746 ... not to mention--"

  "I'm conversant with the history," Spangler repeated quietly. "It's the workmanship I'm interested in. And then, of course, there's the question of authenticity--"

  "Authenticity!" Mr. Carlin chuckled, a dry sound, as if bones had stirred in a cupboard below the stairs. "It's been examined by experts, Mr. Spangler."

  "So was the Lemlier Stradivarius."

  "So true," Mr. Carlin said with a sigh. "But no Stradivarius ever had quite the ... the unsettling effect of the Delver glass."

  "Yes, quite," Spangler said in his softly contemptuous voice. He understood now that there would be no stopping Carlin; he had a mind which was perfectly in tune with the age. "Quite."

  They climbed the third and fourth flights in silence. As they drew closer to the roof of the rambling structure, it became oppressively hot in the dark upper galleries. With the heat came a creeping stench that Spangler knew well, for he had spent all his adult life working in it--a smell of long-dead flies in shadowy corners, of wet rot and creeping wood lice behind the plaster. The smell of age. It was a smell common only to museums and mausoleums. He imagined much the same smell might arise from the grave of a virginal young girl, forty years dead.

  Up here the relics were piled helter-skelter in true junk-shop profusion; Mr. Carlin led Spangler through a maze of statuary, frame-splintered portraits, pompous gold-plated birdcages, the dismembered skeleton of an ancient tandem bicycle. He led him to the far wall where a stepladder had been set up beneath a trapdoor in the ceiling. A dusty padlock hung from the trap.

  Off to the left, an imitation Adonis stared at them pitilessly with blank pupilless eyes. One arm was outstretched, and a yellow sign hung on the wrist which read: ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE.

  Mr. Carlin produced a key ring from his jacket pocket, selected a key, and mounted the stepladder. He paused on the third rung, his bald head gleaming faintly in the shadows. "I don't like that mirror," he said. "I never did. I'm afraid to look into it. I'm afraid I might look into it one day and see ... what the rest of them saw."