The bolt slashed at him through a rift in the mountains. It roared over the precipice and streaked at him. It materialized out of nowhere and everywhere, erupting the stones at his feet. The rock flew up in planed, smoothed slivers, shooting in every direction. Kettridge fell flat and the crack of thunder rolled in on him. He realized it had come with the lightning, that he had been listening to it for almost a minute, before he realized what it was.
The effect on his body was sudden.
Immediately he went deaf. His skin began to prickle with the feel of a million tiny threads pushed into the flesh. His legs and hips were numb, his eyes reflected coruscating pinwheels of brilliance. He could see nothing but light on light inside light over light light light light…
There was a paralysis of his bladder.
Thought: God! You are no God! The Essence-Stealer has screamed and you have fallen!
The rope tightened and Kettridge felt himself being drawn back into the cave.
“No!” he screamed hurriedly. The pressure eased. “No, Lad-nar. That was the Essence-Stealer’s scream. Now I shall have mine. I am a God, I tell you! Let me show you, Lad-nar!”
Then he seized on the lightning blast for his own purpose. “See, Lad-nar! The Essence-Stealer has struck me, but I am still whole. I will rise and walk again. You will see!”
Everywhere the lightning burned and crashed. The whole world was filled with the noise of frothing air and ripped jungle and screaming elements.
He clawed himself to his knees. His legs were weak and numb. The prickling was still there, but lessened. His eyes were starting to unglare and focus again. He still could hear nothing. He half-rose, sank back to one knee, rose again.
His head felt terribly heavy and unanchored.
Then he stood erect.
And walked.
The storm raged about him. Lightning struck again and again. Near him, to the side of him, behind him. One bolt sizzled down and struck him directly. The metal insulating suit served its purpose a second time. The bolt slashed, hit, and side-flashed off, exploding a small, wizened tree growing up through a crack in the rocks. The tree flew into the air, one whole side charred and burned, the other intact.
It fell with a crash directly across Kettridge’s path.
The symptoms of lightning-stroke were multiplied many times in Kettridge, but there was no answering thought of scorn from Lad-nar. Obviously the beast had withdrawn from his mind, in fear.
And he walked.
Soon he came back to the cave.
Thought: you are a God! This I believe. But the Lord of the Heaven has sent his Essence-Stealers. They, too, are mighty, and Lad-nar will lose his essence if he walks there.
“No, Lad-nar. I will show you how to protect yourself.” The old man was sweating and white from his walk, and the numbness extended through his body. He could hear nothing, but the words came clearly to him.
He began to unseal the form-fitting suit.
The storm had already lowered the temperature enough so that he knew he would not fry.
In a few minutes he had the suit off, and it had shrunk back to a pocket-sized replica of the full-sized garment.
Kettridge felt ill. He felt old and tired and ill. It was time to go home, time to quit. It was all over. He had won.
“Lad-nar, take this. Here, give me your hand.”
The beast looked at him with huge, uncomprehending eyes. The old man felt closer, somehow, to this strange creature than to anyone he had ever known. Kettridge pulled his glove on tighter and reached for Lad-nar’s seven-taloned hand. He pulled at the arm of the form-fit suit, and it elastically expanded.
After much stretching and fitting, the beast was encased in the insulating metal-plastic.
Kettridge wanted to laugh at the bunched fur and awkward stance of the massive animal. But again, the laughter would not come.
“Now, Lad-nar, put on the gloves. Never take them off, except when the storms are gone. Always put this God-suit on when the Essence-Stealers scream, and you will be safe.”
Thought: now I can walk in the night?
“Yes. Come.” He moved toward the cave’s mouth. “Now you can get a cat-litter for yourself. I did not bring one because I knew you would believe me and get your own. Come, Lad-nar.” He motioned the beast to go out onto the rocks.
Thought: how will you walk without the God-suit?
Kettridge ran a seamed hand through his white hair. He was glad Lad-nar had thought the question. The multiple flashes of a many-stroked blast filled the air with glare and noise.
Kettridge could not hear the noise.
“I have God-brothers who wait for me in the great house from across the skies that will take me back to the Heaven Home. They will hurry to me and protect me.”
He did not bother to tell the great beast that his search time was almost up and that the Jeremy Bentham’s flitter would home in on his suit beam. It would have been useless homing, had he not secured time.
“Go! Walk, Lad-nar!” he said, throwing his arms out as he felt a God would. “And tell your brothers you have screamed at the Essence-Stealers!”
Thought: I have done this.
The great animal stepped cautiously toward the rocky ledge, fearful and hesitant. Then it bunched its huge muscles and leaped out into the full agony of the storm which crashed in futility about its massive form.
“One day Man will come and make friends with you, Lad-nar,” said the old man, softly. “One day they will come down out of the sky and show you how to live on this world of yours so that you don’t have to hide.”
Kettridge sank down against the inner wall of the cave, suddenly too exhausted to stand.
He had won. He had redeemed himself. If only in his own mind. He had helped take away life from a race, now he had given life to a race.
He closed his eyes peacefully. Even the great blasts of blind lightning did not bother him as he rested. He knew Lad-nar had told his brothers.
He knew the ship was coming for him.
Lad-nar came up the incline and saw the flitter streaking down, lightning playing along its sides in phosphorescent glimmers.
Thought: God! God! Your God-brothers come for you!
He bounded across the scarred and seared rocks, toward the cave.
Kettridge rose and stepped out into the rain and wind.
He ran a few steps, waving his arms in signal. The flitter altered course and headed for the old man.
The lightning struck.
It seemed as though the bolt knew its target. It raced the flitter, sizzling and burning as it came. In a roar of light and dark and screamings it tore at the old man, lifting him high into the air, charring and burning and ripping.
The body landed just outside the cave, blistered and bleeding. The old man was still alive…
Thought: God! You have fallen! Rise, rise, rise! The Essence-Stealers…
The thoughts were hysterical, tearful, torn and wanting. Had the beast been able to shed tears, Kettridge knew it would have done that. The old man lay sightless, eyes gone, senses altogether torn from him. The essence ebbed.
He thought:
Lad-nar. There will come other Gods. They will come to you and you must think to them. You must think these words, Lad-nar. Think to them, Show me a star. Do you hear me, Lad-nar? Do you…
Even as the great beast watched, the essence flickered and died. In the animal’s mind there was a lack, a space of emptiness. Yet there was a contentment. A peace, and Lad-nar knew the essence of the God who walked in the night was soft and unafraid at ending.
The aborigine stood on the rocks below the cave and watched the flitter sink to the stone ledge. He watched as the other Gods from the skies emerged and ran to the charred hulk on the stones.
Through his head, like the blind lightning, streaking everywhere, lightning, the words remained and repeated..
Thought:
Show me a star.
WALK THE HIGH STEEL
The stock advertisement Chip
s Bolden ran in newspapers read:
The Scavenger
Wildcat oil drilling and construction.
I like tough jobs; I get them done—
one way or another.
Write: C. Bolden,
PO Box 5
Manzanola, Colorado
He was an ox of a man: big across the chest and hungry in the backside, with better legs than a steeplejack should have, packing that much meat on him. He was usually bluff with people, the laugh lines burned into his dust-weary face giving away the gentleman that lived beneath the surface. He had pale blue eyes, thin curly hair, and most prominent of all, a pair of fists that looked like sunburnt blowfish left overnight in an air chamber. Spread out, his fingers could easily hold a basketball without it slipping.
At the moment, however, neither hand was engaged in anything as athletic as holding a basketball. One was unsnapping the lock of his battered suitcase, resting on a bed in cabin 14 of the Sleepy Eye Motel, two miles outside the city limits of Holbrook, Arizona. The other was in the process of lifting the receiver of the jangling phone.
“Mr. Bolden,” said the switchboard girl, “I have Miss Lonergan on the line.”
“Great. I’m ready!” Then he smiled softly. It was a strange gentleness, lying there on the face of such a bruiser. His other hand, on the suitcase, flipped the bag open, revealing the ugly black tire iron, lying crosswise atop the rumpled blue suit.
“Mr. Bolden?” came a molten voice from the other end of the line. “This is Marci Lonergan. Welcome to Holbrook. Is it hot enough for you?”
He stopped fooling with the suitcase, in order to pay full attention to the voice. It was deep and throaty, and it sounded pleasantly sultry against the oppressive heat of the Arizona afternoon.
“Why thank you, Miss Lonergan. Glad to be here. Yes indeed, Ma’am, it’s just warm enough for me. I work better with a little sweat to oil me up.” He excused himself for an instant, pulled out a cigarette from the battered pack lying on the bureau, and hurriedly lit with one hand, truck-driver style. “Lightin’ a cigarette,” he explained a moment later. “I hope my being a couple of days late didn’t hang you up too much, but I tried to explain in my telegram.”
“Yes, I understood perfectly,” the warm tones melted. “Something about draining a swamp?”
He rubbed his free hand across his stubbled cheek, tanned and laced by small white scars. “Yes, Ma’am, over in West Texas. But I got it took care of, and I’m here. Your letter sounded real scratchy, so I called your office first thing I got in.”
“My secretary took your call. Couldn’t you find any place closer into town than the Sleepy Eye?”
“I’d rather stay out here. I understand you have some heavy trouble, and I like to stay outside the blast area when I’m off-duty.”
He heard her soft chuckle distinctly. “A big scorch, Mr. Bolden. If you take on this job, you might not be able to stay out of the blast area. Not even if you lived in Anchorage, Alaska.”
“We’ll see.” His reassurance came easily.
“My trouble isn’t amateur, Mr. Bolden. There’s a powerful group of men in this town who want very badly to ruin my construction job. I can’t prove they did it, but I’m sure they’re the ones who killed my father; and I don’t think they’d stop at roughing up an outsider.”
“You’ll have to tell me all about it when we get together.”
“I’m very anxious to see you.”
“Well, just let me scrape off some of this beard and five-state road dirt, and I’ll be over to your office.”
“Fine. Just be careful, pl—”
Chips Bolden’s right ear wasn’t much good. It had been damaged by a length of bicycle chain wielded by a union goon on a bootleg job in Reno in ’48. The chief result of the fracas—after they had taken the goon to the emergency hospital—for Chips, had been hemorrhaging beneath the skin, and several small but occlusive blood clots had formed. He had been operated upon—it was called a fenestration procedure—and a new opening had been made in the bone overlying the inner ear. Then the eardrum had been placed over this new opening so as to transmit sound waves through it. An operation totally successful in 70 to 80% of those treated. Partially successful in another 20 to 25% and a failure in a mere 5 to 10%. Chips had lucked into the 20/25 category, and while he could still hear, faintly, it was always as though the voices were coming at him from a great distance, over a very windy desert. He made up for the deficiency by listening twice as intently with his left ear.
It was his left one, however, that was stuck into the earpiece of the telephone headset, listening to Marci Lonergan saying the word, “Please…”
Thus it was almost impossible for him to hear the sharp, small noises made by the three men as they forced the door of cabin 14. The first he knew of their presence was when a hairy arm grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him against the wall.
“Hold on a minute!” he managed to gasp into the receiver, and setting the phone on the bureau he lunged sharply to his right, catching the first man—a great hairy orangutan of a man—in the chest with a vicious fullback block. Air whoooshed out of the orangutan as his eyes rolled up in their sockets, and Chips broke between them, dipped his great ball of a fist into the suitcase and came up with the tire iron leveled.
They were on him almost before he had cleared the metal from its resting-place, but he was all elbows and meat, and they fell back to see a great giant of a man holding a chunk of tempered chilled steel as though it were a toothpick.
“Jeezus!” one of the men gasped. His gold tooth glinted as he spoke. There was fear in three sets of eyes.
“I keep it for parties.” Chips smiled very tightly. “Now let’s have a ball.” Then he came at them.
The third man wore an outrageously obnoxious sport shirt, with native girls rampant in a field of what looked like asparagus. Some of them were doing deep knee bends. Chips swung the tire iron like a quarterstaff, and the first roundhouse spanged off the rampant field of whatever. The Poor Dresser doubled over, clutching his shattered ribs, and as he straightened, a trickle of blood bubbled up over the corner of his lower lip. His eyes went celingward and he slipped to the floor in rubber-legged stages, like a pair of nylon hose sliding off a table.
The Hairy Ape screamed, “Willie!” and charged over the limp body, right at Chips. The force of his attack carried them both back over the bed, knocking the suitcase to the floor. They tangled in a heap between the bed and the wall, and the Hairy Ape seemed to have lost his mind. His fingers were clutching for Chips’s face. One finger caught in Chips’s mouth and the Ape tried to pull the lip off. Chips bit down, as hard as he could. The Ape shrieked, high and keening, like a noon whistle, and he tried to pull the finger loose. Chips hung on like a turtle. He jacked himself around, and was about to bring his knee up into the Ape’s groin, when a flat, hard edge of hand cracked off the nape of his neck.
The hard guy with the gold tooth had not been idle.
Chips saw a rare constellation, perhaps the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda, and his head rang like a ranch-house triangle at feed time. He freed an arm from the melée, somehow, and struck out blindly. His fist connected with something soft and he heard a whispery “Queep!” and Gold Tooth vanished from above them on the bed. The Ape was back in the scene, and he was pummelling Chips about the shoulders, the stomach, the face, the side of the head, anywhere he could land a blow. Chips was beginning to swim down into a thick, smelly pool of prune juice, but he could not move the arm with the tire iron. It was pinned beneath him, and both of them were trapped between the bed and wall. He ducked his chin to his chest, and waited a tiny instant till the Ape weaved closer. Then he snapped his head up, sharply! Crack! The top of his head connected with the point of the Ape’s jaw, and suddenly he was folded up in the corner with an unconscious Ape.
Chips struggled free, and stood up shakily. He stumbled against the wall, and his head threatened to shake apart into dust. There was a concave pain at th
e top of his skull, as though someone had tapped a railroad spike down into it. His neck was stiff and burned, and he could not move his head without an excruciating pain spearing up into his nerve centers. His right arm felt dead, and there was the silky taste of blood in his mouth.
Gold Tooth came up softly from the floor on the other side of the bed, a crimson welt across his Adam’s Apple, and almost without realizing what he was doing, with a gentle reflex entirely devoid of malice, Chips swung the tire iron in a flat arc. It took Gold Tooth across the side of the head, and with a thwock! there was exposed bone and cartilage, and he was lifting clawed hands to the shattered remnant of his skull. Then he fell backward, absolutely straight, spanged off the wall, and fell sidewise. The wall was black where he’d smeared his blood.
The tire iron dropped from Chips’s hand with a dull thud to the carpet, and he staggered across the room to the bureau. “Hold it…be, be…right back…” he mumbled into the phone, and caromed off several walls till he found the bathroom.
Somehow he managed to get the water tap running, and as the bowl filled, he immersed his face and head in the cold wet. He kept it there till he felt his senses returning, his mind clearing, and then came up for air. Three more times he went down into the dark—and once almost failed to come up—and then dripping water, went back to the phone.
“Mr. Bolden! What happened, what happened, are you—are you all right—”
“I’ll be over to your office in about fifteen minutes,” he mumbled, and racked the receiver. He turned around and the scene in the motel room confronted him unadorned. He fumbled back into the bathroom and was very sick in the sink.
Marci Lonergan had taken one look into the rear of the stake-bed truck, and had turned away ashen. “My God!” she had whispered, her hand going to her mouth. Chips had loaded her into the cab of the truck, the words THE SCAVENGER in red on each door, and asked her who the men belonged to.
“They work for Wheeling; Robert Jack Wheeling, the head of the group that lost the bid on the construction job when Dad got it. High steel men, I think.” She had had difficulty speaking, her head carefully turned so she could not catch sight of the cargo in the rear of the truck.