Duel (23 page)

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Authors: Richard Matheson

BOOK: Duel
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“What, what?” Ross asked, impatient to leave.
Mickey stared at the bodies. He felt caught up in a great, bewildering insanity.
“Shouldn't we … bury ourselves?” he said.
Ross swallowed. He would hear no more. He herded them out of the cabin. Then, as they started down through the wreckage, he looked in at the door. He looked at the tarpaulin with the jumbled mound of bodies beneath it. He pressed his lips together until they were white.
“I'm alive,” he muttered angrily.
Then he turned out the cabin light with tight, vengeful fingers and left.
 
They all sat in the cabin of their own ship. Ross had ordered food brought out from the lockers, but he was the only one eating. He ate with a belligerent rotation of his jaw as though he would grind away all mystery with his teeth.
Mickey stared at the food.
“How long do we have to stay?” he asked, as if he didn't clearly realize that they were to remain permanently.
Mason took it up. He leaned forward in his seat and looked at Ross.
“How long will our food last?” he said.
“There's edible food outside, I've no doubt,” Ross said, chewing.
“How will we know which is edible and which is poisonous?”
“We'll watch the animals,” Ross persisted.
“They're a different type of life,” Mason said. “What they can eat
might be poisonous to us. Besides, we don't even know if there are any animals here.”
The words made his lips raise in a brief, bitter smile. And he'd actually been hoping to contact another people. It was practically humorous.
Ross bristled. “We'll … cross each river as we come to it,” he blurted out as if he hoped to smother all complaint with this ancient homily.
Mason shook his head. “I don't know,” he said.
Ross stood up.
“Listen,” he said. “It's easy to ask questions. We've all made a decision to stay here. Now let's do some concrete thinking about it. Don't tell me what we can't do. I know that as well as you. Tell me what we can do.”
Then he turned on his heel and stalked over to the control board. He stood there glaring at blank-faced gauges and dials. He sat down and began scribbling rapidly in his log as if something of great note had just occurred to him. Later Mason looked at what Ross had written and saw that it was a long paragraph which explained in faulty but unyielding logic why they were all alive.
Mickey got up and sat down on his bunk. He pressed his large hands against his temples. He looked very much like a little boy who had eaten too many green apples against his mother's injunction and who feared retribution on both counts. Mason knew what Mickey was thinking. Of that still body with the skull forced in. The image of himself brutally killed in collision. He, Mason, was thinking of the same thing. And, behavior to the contrary, Ross probably was too.
Mason stood by the port looking out at the silent hulk across the meadow. Darkness was falling. The last rays of the planet's sun glinted off the skin of the crashed rocket ship. Mason turned away. He looked at the outside temperature gauge. Already it was seven degrees and it was still light. Mason moved the thermostat needle with his right forefinger.
Heat being used up, he thought. The energy of our grounded ship being used up faster and faster. The ship drinking its own blood with no possibility of transfusion. Only operation would recharge the ship's energy system. And they were without motion, trapped and stationary.
“How long can we last?” he asked Ross again, refusing to keep silence in the face of the question. “We can't live in this ship indefinitely. The food will run out in a couple of months. And a long time before that the charging system will go. The heat will stop. We'll freeze to death.”
“How do we know the outside temperature will freeze us?” Ross asked, falsely patient.
“It's only sundown,” Mason said, “and already it's … minus thirteen degrees.”
Ross looked at him sullenly. Then he pushed up from his chair and began pacing.
“If we go up,” he said, “we risk …
duplicating
that ship over there.”
“But would we?” Mason wondered. “We can only die once. It seems we already have. In this galaxy. Maybe a person can die once in every galaxy. Maybe that's afterlife. Maybe …”
“Are you through?” asked Ross coldly.
Mickey looked up.
“Let's go,” he said. “I don't want to hang around here.”
He looked at Ross.
Ross said, “Let's not stick out our necks before we know what we're doing. Let's think this out.”
“I have a wife!” Mickey said angrily. “Just because you're not married—”
“Shut up!” Ross thundered.
Mickey threw himself on the bunk and turned to face the cold bulkhead. Breath shuddered through his heavy frame. He didn't say anything. His fingers opened and closed on the blanket, twisting it, pulling it out from under his body.
Ross paced the deck, abstractedly punching at his palm with a hard fist. His teeth clicked together, his head shook as one argument after
another fell before his bullheaded determination. He stopped, looked at Mason, then started pacing again. Once he turned on the outside spotlight and looked to make sure it was not imagination.
The light illumined the broken ship. It glowed strangely, like a huge, broken tombstone. Ross snapped off the spotlight with a soundless snarl. He turned to face them. His broad chest rose and fell heavily as he breathed.
“All right,” he said. “It's
your
lives too. I can't decide for all of us. We'll hand vote on it. That thing out there may be something entirely different from what we think. If you two think it's worth the risk of our lives to go up, we'll … go up.”
He shrugged. “Vote,” he said. “I say we stay here.”
“I say we go,” Mason said.
They looked at Mickey.
“Carter,” said Ross, “what's your vote?”
Mickey looked over his shoulder with bleak eyes.
“Vote,” Ross said.
“Up,” Mickey said. “Take us up. I'd rather die than stay here.”
Ross's throat moved. Then he took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.
“All right,” he said quietly. “We'll go up.”
“God have mercy on us,” Mickey muttered as Ross went quickly to the control board.
The captain hesitated a moment. Then he threw switches. The great ship began shuddering as gasses ignited and began to pour like channeled lightning from the rear vents. The sound was almost soothing to Mason. He didn't care anymore; he was willing, like Mickey, to take a chance. It had only been a few hours. It had seemed like a year. Minutes had dragged, each one weighted with oppressive recollections. Of the bodies they'd seen, of the shattered rocket—even more of the Earth they would never see, of parents and wives and sweethearts and children. Lost to their sight forever. No, it was far better to try to get back.
Sitting and waiting was always the hardest thing for a man to do. He was no longer conditioned for it.
Mason sat down at his board. He waited tensely. He heard Mickey jump up and move over to the engine control board.
“I'm going to take us up easy,” Ross said to them. “There's no reason why we should … have any trouble.”
He paused. They snapped their heads over and looked at him with muscle-tight impatience.
“Are you both ready?” Ross asked.
“
Take us up
,” Mickey said.
Ross jammed his lips together and shoved over the switch that read:
Vertical Rise
.
They felt the ship tremble, hesitate. Then it moved off the ground, headed up with increasing velocity. Mason flicked on the rear viewer. He watched the dark earth recede, tried not to look at the white patch in the corner of the screen, the patch that shone metallically under the moonlight.
“Five hundred,” he read. “Seven-fifty … one thousand … fifteen hundred … .”
He kept waiting. For explosion. For an engine to give out. For their rise to stop.
They kept moving up.
“Three thousand,” Mason said, his voice beginning to betray the rising sense of elation he felt. The planet was getting farther and farther away. The other ship was only a memory now. He looked across at Mickey. Mickey was staring, open-mouthed, as if he were about ready to shout out
“Hurry!”
but was afraid to tempt the fates.
“Six thousand …
seven thousand!
” Mason's voice was jubilant. “We're
out
of it!”
Mickey's face broke into a great, relieved grin. He ran a hand over his brow and flicked great drops of sweat on the deck.
“God,” he said, gasping, “my God.”
Mason moved over to Ross's seat. He clapped the captain on the shoulder.
“We made it,” he said. “Nice flying.”
Ross looked irritated.
“We shouldn't have left,” he said. “It was nothing all the time. Now we have to start looking for another planet.” He shook his head. “It wasn't a good idea to leave,” he said.
Mason stared at him. He turned away shaking his head, thinking … you can't win.
“If I ever see another glitter,” he thought aloud, “I'll keep my big mouth shut. To hell with alien races anyway.”
Silence. He went back to his seat and picked up his graph chart. He let out a long shaking breath. Let Ross complain, he thought, I can take anything now. Things are normal again. He began to figure casually what might have occurred down there on that planet.
Then he happened to glance at Ross.
Ross was thinking. His lips were pressed together. He said something to himself. Mason found the captain looking at him.
“Mason,” he said.
“What?”
“Alien race, you said.”
Mason felt a chill flood through his body. He saw the big head nod once in decision. Unknown decision. His hands started to shake. A crazy idea came. No, Ross wouldn't do that, not just to assuage vanity. Would he?
“I don't …” he started. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mickey watching the captain too.
“
Listen
,” Ross said. “I'll tell you what happened down there. I'll
show
you what happened!”
They stared at him in paralyzing horror as he threw the ship around and headed back.
“What are you doing!” Mickey cried.
“Listen,” Ross said. “Didn't you understand me? Don't you see how we've been tricked?”
They looked at him without comprehension. Mickey took a step toward him.
“Alien race,” Ross said. “That's the short of it. That time-space idea is all wet. But I'll tell you what idea isn't all wet. So we leave the place. What's our first instinct as far as reporting it? Saying it's uninhabitable? We'd do more than that. We wouldn't report it at all.”
“Ross, you're not taking us back!” Mason said, standing up suddenly as the full terror of returning struck him.
“You bet I am!” Ross said, fiercely elated.
“You're crazy!” Mickey shouted at him, his body twitching, his hands clenched at his sides menacingly.
“Listen to me!” Ross roared at them. “Who would be benefited by us not reporting the existence of that planet?”
They didn't answer. Mickey moved closer.
“Fools!” he said. “Isn't it obvious? There
is
life down there. But life that isn't strong enough to kill us or chase us away with force. So what can they do? They don't want us there. So what can they do?”
He asked them like a teacher who cannot get the right answers from the dolts in his class.
Mickey looked suspicious. But he was curious now, too, and a little timorous as he had always been with his captain, except in moments of greatest physical danger. Ross had always led them, and it was hard to rebel against it even when it seemed he was trying to kill them all. His eyes moved to the viewer where the planet began to loom beneath them like a huge dark ball.
“We're alive,” Ross said, “and I say there never
was
a ship down there. We saw it, sure. We
touched
it. But you can see anything if you believe it's there! All your senses can tell you there's something when there's nothing. All you have to do is
believe
it!”

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