The Ghost of a Model T and Other Stories (18 page)

Benton stepped back, trip-hammered Gray's chin with a right and left, took a blow along the jaw that tilted his head with a vicious jolt.

Gray was coming in, coming fast, fists working like pistons. Benton took one quick backward step to gain some room to swing, brought his right fist sizzling from his boot tops. It smacked with a terrific impact full in the banker's face, jarred Benton's arm back to the elbow. In front of Benton, Gray was folding up, fists still pumping feebly, feet still moving forward, but folding at the knees.

Strength went out of the man and he slumped into a pile that moaned and clawed to regain its feet.

Benton stepped away, stood waiting.

Painfully, Gray made it to his feet, stood staring at Benton. His clothes were ripped and torn and a dark stream of blood bubbled from his nose and ran black across his mouth and chin.

“Well?” asked Benton.

Gray lifted a hand to wipe away the blood. “I've had enough,” he said.

“Talk then,” said Benton. “Talk straight and fast.”

Gray mumbled at him. “What you want to know?”

“About the ranches. It was a put-up game?”

Gray shook his head. “All legal,” he protested. “Everything was…”

Benton strode toward him and the man moaned in fright, putting up his hands to shield his face.

“All right, then,” said Benton. “Spit it out.”

“It was the Watsons that thought it up,” Gray told him. He stopped to spit the blood out of his mouth and then went on. “They knew about the market up north and they wanted land and cattle.”

“So you fixed it up to go broke,” said Benton.

Gray nodded. “The bank really didn't go broke, you see. We just doctored up the books, so there'd be some excuse to foreclose on our loans.”

“Then what?”

“That's all,” said Gray. “I foreclosed and the Anchor brand took over. Paid the bank the money and took the land.”

“And you'll testify in court?”

Gray hesitated. Benton reached for him and he backed away. He wiped his mouth again. “I'll testify,” he said.

Suddenly Gray straightened to attention, head cocked to one side, like a dog that has suddenly been snapped from sleep by an unfamiliar sound.

Then Benton heard it, too. The click and rattle of horses' hoofs, somewhere across the ridge.

Gray whirled about, staggered up the slope.

“Help,” he yelled. “Help!”

Benton leaped after him, swift rage brimming in his brain.

“Help!” yelled Gray.

Benton reached him, grasped his shoulder, hauled him around. The man's mouth was opening again, but Benton smashed it shut, smashed it with a blow that cracked like a pistol shot. Gray sagged so suddenly that his falling body ripped loose the hold Benton's hand had upon his coat.

This time he did not moan or stir. He lay huddled on the ground, a limp pile of clothing that fluttered in the wind.

The hoofs across the ridge were speeding up and heading for the top. Frantically, Benton explored the ground for a gun. Three guns, he thought, and not a one in sight.

For a single instant he stood in indecision and that instant was too long.

Mounted men plunged over the ridge top, black silhouettes against the moon and were plunging down the slope. Dust smoked in silver puffs around the horses' jolting hoofs and the men rode silently.

Benton ducked swiftly, started to run, but those on the ridge top saw him, wheeled their mounts, tore down upon him.

Faced about, he waited…and knew that final hope was gone. Gray had yelled when he heard the hoofs, but he could not have known that the riders were from the Anchor ranch. He had only taken a chance, gambling on the fact that they may have been.

And they were.

Four men, who wheeled their horses in a rank in front of Benton, reined them to a sliding stop, sat looking at him, like gaunt, black vultures perching on a tree.

Benton, standing motionless, ticked them off in his brain. Vest, the foreman of the Anchor spread, Indian Joe, Snake McAfee and old Dan Watson himself.

Watson chuckled in his beard, amused.

“No guns,” he said. “Can you imagine that. The great Ned Benton caught without no guns.”

“I shoot him now?” asked Indian Joe and lifted up his gun.

Watson grunted. “Might as well,” he said.

Indian Joe leveled the gun with a grossly exaggerated gesture of careful aiming.

“I nick him up a bit,” said Joe.

“None of that,” snapped Watson, peevishly. “When you fire, give it to him straight between the eyes.”

“No fun that way,” complained Indian Joe.

Watson spoke to Benton. “You got anything to say?”

Benton shook his head.

If he turned and ran, they'd stop him with a storm of lead before he'd gone a dozen feet.

On the hillside above a rock clicked and Vest stiffened in his saddle.

“What was that?” he asked.

Snake laughed at him. “Nothing, Vest. You're just spooky. That's all. Shooting at them shadows back there.”

Slowly, deliberately Indian Joe raised his gun. Benton stared straight into the ugly bore.

The gun flashed an angry puff of red into his eyes and the wind of the screaming bullet stirred the hair upon his head.

“Missed, by Lord!” yelped Indian Joe in mock chagrin.

Watson yelled angrily at him. “I told you none of that!”

Indian Joe was the picture of contriteness. “I do better next time.”

He leveled the gun again and Snake growled at him. “You take too damn long.”

“Got to hit him this time,” said Indian Joe, “or boss get awful mad. Right between the eyes, he said. Right between…”

Up the hill a rifle snarled and Indian Joe stiffened in his saddle, stiffened so that he was standing in the stirrups with his body tense and rigid.

Vest yelled in sudden fright and Indian Joe's horse was pitching, hurling the rider from his back, a rider that was a tumbling empty sack instead of a rigid body.

With a curse, Snake swung his horse around, reaching for his gun. The hilltop rifle spoke again and Snake was huddled in his saddle, clawing at his throat and screaming, screaming with a whistling, gurgling sound. Blackness gushed from his throat onto his clawing hands and he slumped out of the saddle as the horse wheeled suddenly and plunged toward the canyon mouth.

Benton dived for the shining gun that fell from Snake's hand, heard the hammer of the rifle talking on the hill. A horse screamed in agony and far off down the slope he heard the hurried drum of hoofs.

Scooping the weapon up, Benton whirled around. A sixgun roared and he felt the slap of the bullet as it sang across his ribs.

In the moonlight Dan Watson was walking toward him, walking slowly and deliberately, gun leveled at his hip. Behind him lay the horse that he had been riding, downed by the rifle on the hill.

Watson's hat had fallen off and the moon gleamed on his beard. He walked like an angry bear, with broad shoulders hunched and bowed legs waddling.

Benton snapped Snake's gun up, half fumbled with the unfamiliar grip. A heavy gun, he thought, a heavier gun than I have ever used. Too heavy, with a drag that pulls the muzzle down.

Watson fired again and something tugged at Benton's ear, a thing that hummed and made a breeze against his cheek.

By main strength, Benton forced Snake's gun muzzle up, pulled the trigger. The big gun jolted in his hand…jolted again.

Out in front of him, Watson stopped walking, stood for a moment as if surprised.

Then his hand opened and the gun fell out and Watson pitched forward on his face.

From up the hill came a crash of bushes, a cascade of chattering rocks that almost drowned out the beat of plunging hoofs.

Benton swung around, gun half raised. Two riders were tearing down upon him.

One of them waved a rifle at him and screeched in a banshee voice.

“How many did we get?”

“Jingo!” yelled Benton. “Jingo, you old…”

Then he saw the second rider and his words dried up.

Stones rattled about his boots as Ellen Madox reined in her horse less than six feet from him.

Jingo stared at the three bodies on the hillside.

“I guess that finishes it,” he said.

“There were four of them,” said Benton. “Vest must have got away.”

“The hell he did,” snapped Jingo. “Who's that jigger over there?”

He pointed and Benton laughed…a laugh of pure nervousness.

“That's Gray,” he said. “I got him and he coughed up everything, He'll testify in court.”

“Dead men,” said Jingo, sharply, “ain't worth a damn in court.”

“He isn't dead,” protested Benton. “Just colder than a herring.”

“Young Watson should be around somewhere,” said Jingo. “What say we hunt him up?”

Benton shook his head. “Bill Watson is riding and he won't be coming back.”

Jingo squinted at him. “Gal riding with him?”

“I suppose she is,” said Benton.

“Did a downright handsome job on them cows,” said Jingo. “Take a good six weeks to get them all together.”

“You had good help,” said Benton, looking at Ellen Madox. She no longer wore the dress that she had in town, but Levis and a flat felt hat that must have been her brother's, for it was too big for her.

Jingo snorted. “She wasn't supposed to come. Sneaked out after the rest had gone and joined up with us.”

He spat disgustedly. “Her pa was madder than a hornet when he found out about her being with us. Told me off to take her home.”

He spat again. “Always something,” he said, “to spoil a man's good time.”

Benton grinned. “I'll take her off your hands, Jingo. You take care of Gray over there and I'll be plumb proud to see Ellen home.”

Condition of Employment

Originally published in
Galaxy Magazine
in April 1960, “Condition of Employment” was actually sold to Horace Gold at the end of 1958. It echoes, in a way, the theme of “Huddling Place,” a noted story Cliff had written more than a decade earlier about the effect of psychological illness on a space traveler.

—dww

He had been dreaming of home, and when he came awake, he held his eyes tight shut in a desperate effort not to lose the dream. He kept some of it, but it was blurred and faint and lacked the sharp distinction and the color of the dream. He could tell it to himself, he knew just how it was, he could recall it as a lost and far-off thing and place, but it was not there as it had been in the dream.

But even so, he held his eyes tight shut, for now that he was awake, he knew what they'd open on, and he shrank from the drabness and the coldness of the room in which he lay. It was, he thought, not alone the drabness and the cold, but also the loneliness and the sense of not belonging. So long as he did not look at it, he need not accept this harsh reality, although he felt himself on the fringe of it, and it was reaching for him, reaching through the color and the warmth and friendliness of this other place he tried to keep in mind.

At last it was impossible. The fabric of the held-onto dream became too thin and fragile to ward off the moment of reality, and he let his eyes come open.

It was every bit as bad as he remembered it. It was drab and cold and harsh, and there was the maddening alienness waiting for him, crouching in the corner. He tensed himself against it, trying to work up his courage, hardening himself to arise and face it for another day.

The plaster of the ceiling was cracked and had flaked away in great ugly blotches. The paint on the wall was peeling and dark stains ran down it from the times the rain leaked in. And there was the smell, the musty human smell that had been caged in the room too long.

Staring at the ceiling, he tried to see the sky. There had been a time when he could have seen it through this or any ceiling. For the sky had belonged to him, the sky and the wild, dark space beyond it. But now he'd lost them. They were his no longer.

A few marks in a book, he thought, an entry in the record. That was all that was needed to smash a man's career, to crush his hope forever and to keep him trapped and exiled on a planet that was not his own.

He sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed, hunting for the trousers he'd left on the floor. He found and pulled them on and scuffed into his shoes and stood up in the room.

The room was small and mean—and cheap. There would come a day when he could not afford a room even as cheap as this. His cash was running out, and when the last of it was gone, he would have to get some job, any kind of job. Perhaps he should have gotten one before he began to run so short. But he had shied away from it. For settling down to work would be an admission that he was defeated, that he had given up his hope of going home again.

He had been a fool, he told himself, for ever going into space. Let him just get back to Mars and no one could ever get him off it. He'd go back to the ranch and stay there as his father had wanted him to do. He'd marry Ellen and settle down, and other fools could fly the death-traps around the Solar System.

Glamor, he thought—it was the glamor that sucked in the kids when they were young and starry-eyed. The glamor of the far place, of the wilderness of space, of the white eyes of the stars watching in that wilderness—the glamor of the engine-song and of the chill white metal knifing through the blackness and the loneliness of the emptiness, and the few cubic feet of courage and defiance that thumbed its nose at that emptiness.

But there was no glamor. There was brutal work and everlasting watchfulness and awful sickness, the terrible fear that listened for the stutter in the drive, for the
ping
against the metal hide, for any one of the thousand things that could happen out in space.

He picked up his wallet off the bedside table and put it in his pocket and went out into the hall and down the rickety stairs to the crumbling, lopsided porch outside.

And the greenness waited for him, the unrelenting, bilious green of Earth. It was a thing to gag at, to steel oneself against, an indecent and abhorrent color for anyone to look at. The grass was green and all the plants and every single tree. There was no place outdoors and few indoors where one could escape from it, and when one looked at it too long, it seemed to pulse and tremble with a hidden life.

The greenness, and the brightness of the sun, and the sapping beat—these were things of Earth that it was hard to bear. The light one could get away from, and the heat one could somehow ride along with—but the green was always there.

He went down the steps, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. He found a crumpled package and in it one crumpled cigarette. He put it between his lips and threw the pack away and stood at the gate, trying to make up his mind.

But it was a gesture only, this hardening of his mind, for he knew what he would do. There was nothing else to do. He'd done it day after day for more weeks than he cared to count, and he'd do it again today and tomorrow and tomorrow, until his cash ran out.

And after that, he wondered, what?

Get a job and try to strike a bargain with his situation? Try to save against the day when he could buy passage back to Mars—for they'd surely let him ride the ships even if they wouldn't let him run them. But, he told himself, he'd figured that one out. It would take twenty years to save enough, and he had no twenty years.

He lit the cigarette and went tramping down the street, and even through the cigarette, he could smell the hated green.

Ten blocks later, he reached the far edge of the spaceport. There was a ship. He stood for a moment looking at it before he went into the shabby restaurant to buy himself some breakfast.

There was a ship, he thought, and that was a hopeful sign. Some days there weren't any, some days three or four. But there was a ship today and it might be the one.

One day, he told himself, he'd surely find the ship out there that would take him home—a ship with a captain so desperate for an engineer that he would overlook the entry in the book.

But even as he thought it, he knew it for a lie—a lie he told himself each day. Perhaps to justify his coming here each day to check at the hiring hall, to lie to keep his hope alive, to keep his courage up. A lie that made it even barely possible to face the bleak, warm room and the green of Earth.

He went into the restaurant and sat down on a stool.

The waitress came to take his order. “Cakes again?” she asked.

He nodded. Pancakes were cheap and filling and he had to make his money last.

“You'll find a ship today,” said the waitress. “I have a feeling you will.”

“Perhaps I will,” he said, without believing it.

“I know just how you feel,” the waitress told him. “I know how awful it can be. I was homesick once myself, the first time I left home. I thought I would die.”

He didn't answer, for he felt it would not have been dignified to answer. Although why he should now lay claim to dignity, he could not imagine.

But this, in any case, was more than simple homesickness. It was planetsickness, culturesickness, a cutting off of all he'd known and wanted.

Sitting, waiting for the cakes to cook, he caught the dream again—the dream of red hills rolling far into the land, of the cold, dry air soft against the skin, of the splendor of the stars at twilight and the faery yellow of the distant sandstorm. And the low house crouched against the land, with the old gray-haired man sitting stiffly in a chair upon the porch that faced toward the sunset.

The waitress brought the cakes.

The day would come, he told himself, when he could afford no longer this self-pity he carried. He knew it for what it was and he should get rid of it. And yet it was a thing he lived with—even more than that, it had become a way of life. It was his comfort and his shield, the driving force that kept him trudging on each day.

He finished the cakes and paid for them.

“Good luck,” said the waitress, with a smile.

“Thank you,” he said.

He tramped down the road, with the gravel crunching underfoot and the sun like a blast upon his back, but he had left the greenness. The port lay bare and bald, scalped and cauterized.

He reached where he was going and went up to the desk.

“You again,” said the union agent.

“Anything for Mars?”

“Not a thing. No, wait a minute. There was a man in here not too long ago.”

The agent got up from the desk and went to the door. Then he stepped outside the door and began to shout at someone.

A few minutes later, he was back. Behind him came a lumbering and irate individual. He had a cap upon his head that said CAPTAIN in greasy, torn letters, but aside from that he was distinctly out of uniform.

“Here's the man,” the agent told the captain. “Name of Anson Cooper. Engineer first class, but his record's not too good.”

“Damn the record!” bawled the captain. He said to Cooper: “Do you know Morrisons?”

“I was raised with them,” said Cooper. It was not the truth, but he knew he could get by.

“They're good engines,” said the captain, “but cranky and demanding. You'll have to baby them. You'll have to sleep with them. And if you don't watch them close, they'll up and break your back.”

“I know how to handle them,” said Cooper.

“My engineer ran out on me.” The captain spat on the floor to show his contempt for runaway engineers. “He wasn't man enough.”

“I'm man enough,” Cooper declared.

And he knew, standing there, what it would be like. But there was no other choice. If he wanted to get back to Mars, he had to take the Morrisons.

“O.K., then, come on with you,” the captain said.

“Wait a minute,” said the union agent. “You can't rush a man off like this. You have to give him time to pick up his duffle.”

“I haven't any to pick up,” Cooper said, thinking of the few pitiful belongings back in the boarding house. “Or none that matters.”

“You understand,” the agent said to the captain, “that the union cannot vouch for a man with a record such as his.”

“To hell with that,” said the captain. “Just so he can run the engines. That's all I ask.”

The ship stood far out in the field. She had not been much to start with and she had not improved with age. Just the job of riding on a craft like that would be high torture, without the worry of nursing Morrisons.

“She'll hang together, no fear,” said the captain. “She's got a lot more trips left in her than you'd think. It beats all hell what a tub like that can take.”

Just one more trip, thought Cooper. Just so she gets me to Mars. Then she can fall apart, for all I care.

“She's beautiful,” he said, and meant it.

He walked up to one of the great landing fins and laid a hand upon it. It was solid metal, with all the paint peeled off it, with tiny pits of corrosion speckling its surface and with a hint of cold, as if it might not as yet have shed all the touch of space.

And this was it, he thought. After all the weeks of waiting, here finally was the thing of steel and engineering that would take him home again.

He walked back to where the captain stood.

“Let's get on with it,” he said. “I'll want to look the engines over.”

“They're all right,” said the captain.

“That may be so. I still want to run a check on them.”

He had expected the engines to be bad, but not as bad as they turned out to be. If the ship had not been much to look at, the Morrisons were worse.

“They'll need some work,” he said. “We can't lift with them, the shape they're in.”

The captain raved and swore. “We have to blast by dawn, damn it! This is a goddam emergency.”

“You'll lift by dawn,” snapped Cooper. “Just leave me alone.”

He drove his gang to work, and he worked himself, for fourteen solid hours, without a wink of sleep, without a bite to eat.

Then he crossed his fingers and told the captain he was ready.

They got out of atmosphere with the engines holding together. Cooper uncrossed his fingers and sighed with deep relief. Now all he had to do was keep them running.

The captain called him forward and brought out a bottle. “You did better, Mr. Cooper, than I thought you would.”

Cooper shook his head. “We aren't there yet, Captain. We've a long way still to go.”

“Mr. Cooper,” said the captain, “you know what we are carrying? You got any idea at all?”

Cooper shook his head.

“Medicines,” the captain told him. “There's an epidemic out there. We were the only ship anywhere near ready for takeoff. So we were requisitioned.”

“It would have been much better if we could have overhauled the engines.”

“We didn't have the time. Every minute counts.”

Cooper drank the liquor, stupid with a tiredness that cut clear to the bone. “Epidemic, you say. What kind?”

“Sand fever,” said the captain. “You've heard of it, perhaps.”

Cooper felt the chill of deadly fear creep along his body. “I've heard of it.” He finished off the whisky and stood up. “I have to get back, sir. I have to watch those engines.”

“We're counting on you, Mr. Cooper. You have to get us through.”

He went back to the engine room and slumped into a chair, listening to the engine-song that beat throughout the ship.

He had to keep them going. There was no question of it now, if there'd ever been a question. For now it was not the simple matter of getting home again, but of getting needed drugs to the old home planet.

“I promise you,” he said, talking to himself. “I promise you we'll get there.”