Complete Stories (16 page)

We were going at least fifteen miles per hour too fast. Harry was slouched back in his seat, stiff arms outstretched. He wore a forgotten smile and kept giving the wheel abrupt, precise little twitches. I had to think of Mr. Toad’s wild ride. At least we were in open country.

We hadn’t encountered another car for about five miles now. Harry was taking the curves wider and wider…brushing across them and fishtailing out. Humming unhappily, I studied the map Marston had sent us. Great Crater. We should be almost …

There was a wild squealing. I cried out something of a religious nature and threw my hands up to protect my face. The car bounced like a skipped stone, slewed and shuddered to a stop. The engine died. The sun was bright and hot.

“Pretty flashy, boys. And ah’d always thought you scientist fellas were a bunch of ribbon clerks. Welcome to Great Crater!”

A limited-function android with a TV-screen face pulled open the cyclone-fence gate Harry had stopped for. The android was dressed like a gunslinger. Van Marston’s familiar features grinned at us from the screen.

Immediately beyond the gate, the road slanted sharply downwards…dropping a hundred meters to the floor of Great Crater. The crater was a few kilometers across. A mist clung to the heavily irrigated grounds. I couldn’t quite make out the mansion I knew lay at the center.

As soon as the gate was fully open, Harry revved up the engine to a chattering scream and peeled out, kicking cubic meters of gravel up into a roostertail. When the road dropped out from under us we actually left the ground.

“YEEEEE
HAW
!” Marston’s amplified voice whooped. The android drew a six-shooter and fired two shots down the slope after us. Presumably it had aimed to miss.

Marston had made his bundle in oil and uranium. He wasn’t what you’d normally think of as a Friend Of The Earth. But now that he’d retired, he’d tried to fix up his Great Crater estate like one of those wild animal parks. Some giraffes were stalking through the tall grass to our right, and down where the driveway leveled out, a tremendous snake lay sunning himself.

Still accelerating, Harry detoured around the snake, knocking a cloud of winged insects out of the elephant grass. The unexpected lurch made me smack my head on the edge of the window. Suddenly I’d had enough.

I reached my left foot over and stepped on the brake. Hard. At the same time I took the key out of the ignition and pocketed it. Far above us, the android fired another shot. You could hardly hear it over the steady chirping of the insects.

“Harry, the car’s rented in my name. And we’ve got some delicate machinery in the trunk. What are you trying to prove?”

We’d skidded to a stop half off the road, some hundred feet past that huge snake. It was watching us with glassy black eyes, and seemed to be nibbling its tail. Marston’s house was still out of sight.

Finally Harry answered. “You know how I feel, Fletch. I don’t like Marston. He’s stupid. He’s a bully.” Harry’s hands clenched and unclenched on the wheel. “I knew a kid just like him in eighth grade. Donny Lyons. Every day Donny Lyons would knock me down and steal my dessert. Until one day I hid one of my father’s false teeth inside a Twinkie.” Harry let out one of his weird giggles.

“Look, Harry. Marston wants to give us a lot of money to help float his corpse in outer space forever. We’re going to take the money. We need it because for some crazy reason you wouldn’t let me market that waste disposal device of yours …”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“
I know
, Harry. Just let me finish. The point is that we can take Marston for a lot of bucks. You
told
me you don’t see how his capsule can avoid crashing…sooner or later. So just remember that we’re screwing him. But, please, for God’s sake, don’t tell him. Then everyone’ll be happy.”

“Everyone except his wife.”

“Look, how’s
she
going to know if Marston’s capsule falls into a star somewhere? As if she’d care anyway. She’s not even thirty! Now, will you trade places with me and let me drive?”

Harry opened his door and got out heavily. It was hot, and the plastic seat was sweaty where he’d sat. I waited a minute before sliding over. Harry stood next to the car and stared back at that snake.

“Isn’t there some myth?” he said when he got back in. “About a snake who swallows his own tail?”

“Yeah. I don’t know.” I rolled up my window. There was something moving towards us through the tall grass on our left. It would be typical of Marston to have lions loose to handle intruders. I started up the engine and drove on.

There was a second fence around Marston’s house and lawn. The old man was out in front, leaning on a hoe and waiting for us. I couldn’t believe how skinny he’d gotten. Lung cancer. He pushed one of the buttons set into the hoe handle. The inner gate opened for us.

“Welcome, boys! Welcome to my little Garden of Eden. Let me show you mah plot!” His diseased voice had a grainy, raucous quality.

I got out and went over to gladhand our pigeon, but Harry just sat in the car, ostentatiously picking his teeth.

“Y’all wouldn’t have to do that if you’d stop eatin’ flesh!” Marston called out to him. “
Live and let live
. It’s Mother Nature’s law!” Marston had been one of America’s most vocal vegetarians for several years now.

Harry examined the end of his toothpick. “That’s not what you said when you closed down the solar energy companies, Mr. Marston.” He spoke without looking up. “Back then it was
eat or be eaten
.”

Marston looked back at me with a genial smile. “Guess ah’ve always wanted to see me a real genius. Now ah know.” He hooked his thumb towards Harry and stage-whispered, “Looks lahk a cross between a cow-flop and an albino toad, don’t he?”

“Really, Van.” A melodious voice came from the shady porch. “That’s no way to talk about the author of
The Geometrodynamics of the Degenerate Tensor
?” In true Southern belle style, each sentence ended as a question.

“Well, point mah head and call me Doctor,” Marston chortled. “Ah had no ideah!”

Evangeline Marston walked down the steps, a graceful arm outstretched. She wore a jiggling T-shirt and skintight red lamé jeans. I had to bite my tongue to keep from moaning.

“Don’t listen to Van, Dr. Gerber. We’re really so happy to meet you?” Harry pocketed his toothpick and got out of the car with alacrity. He was as much of a horny bastard as the next man.

“I didn’t realize you were abreast of current cosmological theory, Mrs. Marston.” Harry’s big livery lips stretched in a wet smile. “I’d be happy to send you some preprints.”

“Oh, you would? I have the nicest little professor at Austin who’d be so delighted? And do call me Evangeline.”

“Pleased to meet you, Evangeline,” I sang out, and basked for an instant in her warm gaze. Harry grunted something similar.

“Y’all just have to come see mah crops now,” Marston said, waving us on around the house. “Ole Eva and me have been living off the land, ain’t we sugar?” He gave the gorgeous red apple of her rear a lingering pat.

In back of the house Marston had his famous garden. He always had his TV spots filmed with him standing in it…usually leaning on that goddamn hoe. All his companies had ever done was to rip the Earth off, but now the fact that he had a garden was supposed to make us forget all that.

For all Marston’s talk about Mother Earth, you could tell that he had a crazy fear that the old girl was going to get back at him. He was so scared of ending up underground that he’d hired us to help him launch his corpse into outer space. According to his letter he had only a few weeks left.

Evangeline walked in among the plants and tossed Marston a ripe tomato. He caught it and bit in thirstily, the juice running down his knobby old chin.

“Why don’t you just let Eva bury you in the garden?” Harry suggested with deliberate cruelty. “I’m sure you’d make good fertilizer.”

A pulsing snake of a vein sprang into relief on Marston’s forehead. “That is
just
,” he wheezed angrily, “what ah do
not
want to happen. As you verah well know, Mr. Genius author of
Tense Jamaican Degenerates
. As you
verah
well know!” His dull old eyes brightened with fury.

I stepped in. We’d come here to close a deal, not to trade insults. “I’m sorry, Mr. Marston. Dr. Gerber has only been involved with the technical design aspects. I’m sure he was not aware that …”

Gasping for breath, the old man went on as if I hadn’t spoken. Harry had struck a nerve. “Ah, Van Marston, am not going to rot in the ground. And ah am not going to
burn
in no fire. Ah am going to stay just as ah am fo’evvah and a
day
!” He glared at Harry with pure hatred.

“Yes, sir!” I said with an ingratiating smile. “And Fletcher & Company is going to make it happen for you. Your guidance system is in our car. All systems go! I’ve got the plans right here.” I patted my briefcase. “If you’d care to …”

“I’m sure that you distinguished gentlemen must be absolutely famished?” Eva said, drifting out of the garden. The contrast between her swiveling hips and her refined, magnolia-blossom voice was exquisite. Those pants could have been painted on. Briefly I let myself imagine licking the paint off.

At lunch I was polite and shared Marston’s stewed corn and zucchini. Harry and Evangeline had TV-dinners of Mexican food.

“Eva doesn’t like vegetables,” Marston confided in me. “Ah have to eat just about everything that garden grows.” A TV-screen-faced android cleared the dishes away.

The screen was playing an old-South movie staring Shirley Temple and Mr. Bojangles. “Oh my goo’ness,” the android murmured, and set a bottle of bourbon on the table. Happily, I poured myself a drink.

There really had been something special about the vegetables. Eating them had filled me with an unusual sense of…completeness. “The soil is special,” Marston was saying. I listened with a patient smile. “Mah plot is right on the spot where the meteor struck.” He leaned across the table with an expression of senile cunning. “We found part of it, too. The remains of an alien spaceship. Ah made it into mah sarcophagus.”

Harry had been busy watching Evangeline chew, but this last remark drew him into the conversation. “Chariots of the Gods, Mr. Marston? Fact is stranger than fiction, eh?”

That little vein on the old man’s forehead popped out again. He stood up angrily. “You just come on out to the barn with me, toad head. Ah have nevah …” A wet, heavy cough cut him off.

In an instant Evangeline was at his side. In between the brutal coughs Marston was gasping air with pathetic little whoops. His face was red, and his eyes bulged out. Suddenly a thick gusher of blood vomited out of his mouth. The eyes went out like lights. He was dead when he hit the floor.

Evangeline looked wild-eyed from him to me to Harry. “You …” she got out in a thin strained voice. Then she began throwing things. A metal trivet caught Harry in the temple, but I managed to grab her wrists before she got the carving knives. I had been wrong when I’d said she wouldn’t care if Marston died. I don’t know why, but she loved that scrawny old earthraper.

I was ready to forget the contract and leave, but the gate-control buttons were keyed to Marston’s and Evangeline’s fingerprints only. And Evangeline wanted to do things just as Marston had planned.

So I helped her put him in his cylindrical coffin. It was made of strips of wood fit together like a Chinese puzzle. Marston had made it himself, out of a cottonwood tree he’d cut down to dig his garden. We slid Marston in there naked and took him downstairs to the walk-in freezer.

The physical labor of hauling the coffin to the basement helped calm Evangeline down. I strained my milk, and ended up wishing I’d gotten the android to help. When the old man was stowed like he’d wanted, I helped myself to some more of his bourbon and sat down on the porch with Evangeline. The shrilling of the grasshoppers washed over us.

“Where is that awful toad-man?” Evangeline asked suddenly. It was not clear to me what she wanted him for.

“Harry didn’t kill your husband, Mrs. Marston. It was cancer. And, if you’ll forgive my saying so, your husband’s companies have probably led to more …”

“You don’t have to tell me that, Mr. Fletcher. My husband knew what he did to the Earth. And he was scared the Earth wouldn’t forgive him for it. That’s one of the reasons …” Her voice caught.

“One of the reasons he wanted us to launch him into space,” I filled in. “Well, it shouldn’t be hard. He’s already got the rocket?”

“Yes, we have it in an underground silo right over there.” She waved towards the barn. “And Van and I built his own little capsule for him.” She pushed her voice on. “All you and…and Dr. Gerber have to do is plan a course and install something to keep him from falling into any stars.”

“He wants to float in outer space forever,” I said. “That’s fine with me. Let me show you how the system works.” I got out some papers. I’d done most of the work on this one, and was eager to impress this beautiful woman.

The heart of the system was a set of piezoelectric crystals. Whenever Marston’s capsule approached a gravitating object, the tidal forces would squeeze a trickle of current out of one of the crystals. Each crystal was hooked in to a little ion jet. The result was that Marston’s capsule would automatically adjust its path to avoid any star or planet which came its way. In the absolute cold of outer space, the crystals would be sensitive enough to react to a star that was still a light-year off. Since the guidance jets would react so early, they didn’t have to be very strong.

“Yes,” Evangeline said when I’d finished explaining. “But what happens when the jets run out of juice?”

I hadn’t expected her to think of that. “The charge should be more than adequate for a thousand years,” I extemporized. “That certainly …”

“It’s not forever,” she protested. “Van wants to last forever…not just end up in some star a thousand years from now.”

Harry ambled around the corner of the house. He looked like he wanted to laugh. Holding a tight, straight mouth he took a seat next to me. There was a silence.