Planet Stories Super Pack #2. Ray Bradbury, Nelson S. Bond, Leigh Brackett

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СКАЧАТЬ stared at her aghast, uncomprehending. "Rima!" he cried. "Lost homeland? I don’t understand—"

      The maid of Nadron smiled wanly. Her voice, when she spoke, was infinitely gentle.

      "Surely you should know, Dirk Morris, that one cannot pass with impunity from one universe of vibration to another?"

      Dirk said, "You mean that you, as I did, have become a…a wraith to your own world? That henceforth you have no true existence on Nadron, as I none on Earth?"

      Rima nodded quietly, sadly.

      "But then," stammered Dirk, "if not on Nadron, where is your new plane of existence?" A hope caught and tugged at his heart. "Earth, perhaps? Our planet will become your new world?"

      *

      Rima shook her head. "No, Dirk Morris. The atomic pathway of Space-Time winds ever upward…not downward to a lower vibrational plane. When this protective shield, which already wanes—" She glanced with a swift, despairing apprehension as the iridescence dulled, and a crepuscular wavering dimmed its outlines—"When this shield wanes, I shall move…forward to a bourne I cannot guess. A better world, perhaps, or…a worse—"

      "No!" cried Dirk. He started forward, but within the blazing column a white arm rose in stern command.

      "No farther, Dirk. To touch this field means death!"

      "Rima!" cried Dick huskily. "Rima, you shouldn’t have done this. It wasn’t required of you!"

      "The quest of liberty," said the girl softly, "is the quest of all men, all women, everywhere. I was watching your progress, Dirk. When I saw you had been trapped, I knew someone must come to your aid, someone must carry out the plans you had so carefully laid.

      "My father was too old. The journey between our two worlds is…well, not without pain. So—" The girl smiled—"I came."

      "You sacrificed yourself," cried Dirk humbly, "for us. It is too much. Earth can never repay you, Rima."

      "I was repaid when you refused life at the expense of your own honor, Dirk. Now it is done I can tell you that on your decision at that moment rested the future fate of Earth. We of Nadron have ever hesitated in dabbling in the affairs of others. Had you proved unworthy of our aid in that moment of trial. I would not have made the journey.

      "And now—" There flickered in her eyes a shadow of thin, wondering fear as the veil of flame about her seemed to shudder—"the time has come for…parting—"

      "No!" shouted Dirk, as if by the very strength of his cry he could withhold the inexorable. "No, Rima! Don’t—"

      His cry ended in a little moan. For at that moment the shimmering column trembled and…vanished like the flame of a snuffed candle. The last vision of Rima to be burned forevermore upon the retina of Dirk Morris’ memory was that of a slim and gallant goddess, whiteclad, lifting a soft arm in salute…and farewell.

      Then…nothing.

      *

      Dirk turned away, shaken. He whispered, "Gone! Rima…gone…no one knows where—"

      Lenore said soberly, "She loved you, too, Dirk."

      "No. She never loved me. Not as I love you…not as you love me—"

      "It was a different kind of love," said the princess.

      "I will find her!" vowed Dirk brokenly.

      Lenore moved to his side quietly; the warmth of her beside him like the courage of a voice in the wilderness.

      "You and I," she breathed, "together, Dirk."

      And suddenly, though there stretched before him a new and greater quest than that recently acquitted, Dirk was consumed with a vast impatience to know again the lips of the girl whose nearness was a heady wine, challenging him to dare any danger. He turned to Lenore.

      "Together," he agreed. "But first I must return to Nadron to lay the plans. You…you will come soon, my Princess?"

      "Soon," she promised. "Soon. But, first—"

      She moved toward his voice. If she closed her eyes, she could not tell it was invisible arms that held her close, nor invisible lips that quickened upon her own....

      Thralls of the Endless Night

      by Leigh Brackett

       The Ship held an ancient secret that meant life to the dying east-aways of the void. Then Wes Kirk revealed the secret to his people’s enemies—and found that his betrayal meant the death of the girl he loved.

      Wes Kirk shut his teeth together, hard. He turned his back on Ma Kirk and the five younger ones huddled around the box of heat-stones and went to the doorway, padding soft and tight with the anger in him.

      He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.

      The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk’s back. He said carefully,

      "I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their families."

      His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,

      "Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to freeze?" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking child. She added sharply, "Besides, that’s fool’s talk, Jakk Randl’s talk, and only gets the sucking-plant."

      "Who’s to hear it?" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.

      The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms, guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust that burst when touched.

      Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.

      Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.

      Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.

      And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.

      The СКАЧАТЬ