Skeleton Crew (52 page)

There was sand underneath.

He put the fish there regardless, then carefully poured the water into the jerrican he was using as a catcher. It would all have to be purified, but even if the purifiers hadn’t been working, he thought that in another couple of days he wouldn’t balk at drinking aquarium water just because it might have a few loose scales and a little goldfish shit in it.

He purified the water, divided it, and took Rand’s share back up the side of the dune. Rand was right where he had been, as if he had never moved.

“Rand. I brought you your share of the water.” He unzipped the pouch on the front of Rand’s EP suit and slipped the flat plastic flask inside. He was about to press the zip-strip closed with his thumbnail when Rand brushed his hand away. He took the flask out. Stenciled on the front was ASN/CLASS SHIP’S SUPPLIES STORAGE FLASK CL. #23196755 STERILE WHEN SEAL IS UNBROKEN. The seal was broken now, of course; Shapiro had had to fill the bottle up.

“I purified—”

Rand opened his fingers. The flask fell into the sand with a soft plop. “Don’t want it.”

“Don’t ... Rand, what’s wrong with you? Jesus Christ, will you
stop
it?”

Rand did not reply.

Shapiro bent over and picked up storage flask #23196755. He brushed off the grains of sand clinging to the sides as if they were huge, swollen germs.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” Shapiro repeated. “Is it shock? Do you think that’s what it is? Because I can give you a pill ... or a shot. But it’s getting to me, I don’t mind telling you. You just standing out here looking at the next forty miles of nothing! It’s
sand!
Just
sand!”

“It’s a beach,” Rand said dreamily. “Want to make a sand castle?”

“Okay, good,” Shapiro said. “I’m going to go get a needle and an amp of Yellowjack. If you want to act like a goddam dronehead, I’ll treat you like one.”

“If you try to inject me with something, you better be quiet when you sneak up behind me,” Rand said mildly. “Otherwise, I’ll break your arm.”

He could do it, too. Shapiro, the astrogator, weighed a hundred and forty pounds and stood five-five. Physical combat was not his specialty. He grunted an oath and turned away, back to the ship, holding Rand’s flask.

“I think it’s alive,” Rand said. “I’m actually pretty sure of it.”

Shapiro looked back at him and then out at the dunes. The sunset had given them a gold filigree at their smooth, sweeping caps, a filigree that shaded delicately down to the blackest ebony in the troughs; on the next dune, ebony shaded back to gold. Gold to black. Black to gold. Gold to black and black to gold and gold to—

Shapiro blinked his eyes rapidly, and rubbed a hand over them.

“I have several times felt this particular dune move under my feet,” Rand told Shapiro. “It moves very gracefully. It is like feeling the tide. I can smell its smell on the air, and the smell is like salt.”

“You’re crazy,” Shapiro said. He was so terrified that he felt as if his brains had turned to glass.

Rand did not reply. Rand’s eyes searched the dunes, which went from gold to black to gold to black in the sunset.

Shapiro went back to the ship.

 

Rand stayed on the dune all night, and all the next day.

Shapiro looked out and saw him. Rand had taken off his EP suit, and the sand had almost covered it. Only one sleeve stuck out, forlorn and supplicating. The sand above and below it reminded Shapiro of a pair of lips sucking with a toothless greed at a tender morsel. Shapiro felt a crazy desire to pelt up the side of the dune and rescue Rand’s EP suit.

He did not.

He sat in his cabin and waited for the rescue ship. The smell of Freon had dissipated. It was replaced by the even less desirable smell of Grimes decaying.

The rescue ship did not come that day or that night or on the third day.

Sand somehow appeared in Shapiro’s cabin, although the hatchway was closed and the seal still appeared perfectly tight. He sucked the little puddles of sand up with the porta-vac as he had sucked up puddles of spilled water on that first day.

He was very thirsty all the time. His flask was nearly empty already.

He thought he had begun to smell salt on the air; in his sleep he heard the sound of gulls.

And he could hear the sand.

The steady wind was moving the first dune closer to the ship. His cabin was still okay—thanks to the porta-vac—but the sand was already taking over the rest. Mini-dunes had reached through the blown locks and laid hold of ASN/29. It sifted in tendrils and membranes through the vents. There was a drift in one of the blown tanks.

Shapiro’s face grew gaunt and pebbly with beard shadow.

Near sunset of the third day, he climbed up the dune to check on Rand. He thought about taking a hypodermic, then rejected it. It was a lot more than shock; he knew that now. Rand was insane. It would be best if he died quickly. And it looked as if that was exactly what was going to happen.

Shapiro was gaunt; Rand was emaciated. His body was a scrawny stick. His legs, formerly rich and thick with ironpumper’s muscle, were now slack and droopy. The skin hung on them like loose socks that keep falling down. He was wearing only his undershorts, and they were red nylon, and they looked absurdly like a ball-hugger bathing suit. A light beard had begun to grow on his face, fuzzing his hollow cheeks and chin. His beard was the color of beach sand. His hair, formerly a listless brown shade, had bleached out to a near blond. It hung over his forehead. Only his eyes, peering through the fringe of his hair with bright blue intensity, still lived fully. They studied the beach

relentlessly.

Now Shapiro saw a bad thing. It was a very bad thing indeed. He saw that Rand’s face was turning into a sand dune. His beard and his hair were choking his skin.

“You,” Shapiro said, “are going to die. If you don’t come down to the ship and drink, you are going to die.”

Rand said nothing.

“Is that what you
want?”

Nothing. There was the vacuous snuffle of the wind, but no more. Shapiro observed that the creases of Rand’s neck were filling up with sand.

“The only thing I
want,”
Rand said in a faint, faraway voice like the wind, “is my Beach Boys tapes. They’re in my cabin.”

“Fuck you!” Shapiro said furiously. “But do you know what I hope? I hope a ship comes before you die. I want to see you holler and scream when they pull you away from your precious goddam beach. I want to see what happens then!”

“Beach’ll get you, too,” Rand said. His voice was empty and rattling, like wind inside a split gourd—a gourd which has been left in a field at the end of October’s last harvest. “Take a listen, Bill. Listen to the
wave.”

Rand cocked his head. His mouth, half-open, revealed his tongue. It was as shriveled as a dry sponge.

Shapiro heard something.

He heard the dunes. They sang songs of Sunday afternoon at the beach—naps on the beach with no dreams. Long naps. Mindless peace. The sound of crying gulls. Shifting, thoughtless particles. Walking dunes. He heard ... and was drawn. Drawn toward the dunes.

“You hear it,” Rand said.

Shapiro reached into his nose and dug with two fingers until it bled. Then he could close his eyes; his thoughts came slowly and clumsily together. His heart was racing.

I was almost like Rand. Jesus!
...
it almost had me!

He opened his eyes again and saw that Rand had become a conch shell on a long deserted beach, straining forward toward all the mysteries of an undead sea, staring out at the dunes and the dunes and the dunes.

No more,
Shapiro moaned inside himself.

Oh, but listen to this wave,
the dunes whispered back.

Against his better judgment, Shapiro listened.

Then his better judgment ceased to exist.

Shapiro thought:
I could hear better if I sat down.

He sat down at Rand’s feet and put his heels on his thighs like a Yaqui Indian and listened.

He heard the Beach Boys and the Beach Boys were singing about fun, fun, fun. He heard them singing that the girls on the beach were all within reach. He heard—

—a hollow sighing of the wind, not in his ear but in the canyon between right brain and left brain—he heard that sighing somewhere in the blackness which is spanned only by the suspension bridge of the corpus callosum, which connects conscious thought to the infinite. He felt no hunger, no thirst, no heat, no fear. He heard only the voice in the emptiness.

And a ship came.

It came swooping out of the sky, afterburners scratching a long orange track from right to left. Thunder belted the delta-wave topography, and several dunes collapsed like bullet-path brain damage. The thunder ripped Billy Shapiro’s head open and for a moment he was torn both ways,
ripped,
torn down the middle—

Then he was up on his feet.

“Ship!”
he screamed.
“Holy fuck! Ship! Ship! SHIP!”

It was a belt trader, dirty and buggered by five hundred—or five thousand—years of clan service. It surfed through the air, banged crudely upright, skidded. The captain blew jets and fused sand into black glass. Shapiro cheered the wound.

Rand looked around like a man awaking from a deep dream.

“Tell it to go away, Billy.”

“You don’t understand.” Shapiro was shambling around, shaking his fists in the air. “You’ll be all right—”

He broke toward the dirty trader in big, leaping strides, like a kangaroo running from a ground fire. The sand clutched at him. Shapiro kicked it away. Fuck you, sand. I got a honey back in Hansonville. Sand never had no honey. Beach never had no hard-on.

The trader’s hull split. A gangplank popped out like a tongue. A man strode down it behind three sampler androids and a guy built into treads that was surely the captain. He wore a beret with a clan symbol on it, anyway.

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!”