When the beetle was gone over the hill, Lantry retreated into a nearby
forest. A world full of bungling helping people. By God, you couldn't
even _walk_ without being accused of sickness. That meant only one
thing. He must not walk any longer, he had to ride. He should have
accepted that fellow's offer.
The rest of the night he walked far enough off the highway so that if
a beetle rushed by he had time to vanish in the underbrush. At dawn he
crept into an empty dry water-drain and closed his eyes.
* * * * *
_The dream was as perfect as a rimed snowflake._
_He saw the graveyard where he had lain deep and ripe over the
centuries. He heard the early morning footsteps of the laborers
returning to finish their work._
_"Would you mind passing me the shovel, Jim?"_
_"Here you go."_
_"Wait a minute, wait a minute!"_
_"What's up?"_
_"Look here. We didn't finish last night, did we?"_
_"No."_
_"There was one more coffin, wasn't there?"_
_"Yes."_
_"Well, here it is, and open!"_
_"You've got the wrong hole."_
_"What's the name say on the gravestone?"_
_"Lantry. William Lantry."_
_"That's him, that's the one! Gone!"_
_"What could have happened to it?"_
_"How do I know. The body was here last night."_
_"We can't be sure, we didn't look."_
_"God, man, people don't bury empty coffins. He was in his box. Now he
isn't."_
_"Maybe this box was empty."_
_"Nonsense. Smell that smell? He was here all right."_
_A pause._
_"Nobody would have taken the body, would they?"_
_"What for?"_
_"A curiosity, perhaps."_
_"Don't be ridiculous. People just don't steal. Nobody steals."_
_"Well, then, there's only one solution."_
_"And?"_
_"He got up and walked away."_
_A pause. In the dark dream, Lantry expected to hear laughter. There
was none. Instead, the voice of the gravedigger, after a thoughtful
pause, said, "Yes. That's it, indeed. He got up and walked away."_
_"That's interesting to think about," said the other._
_"Isn't it, though?"_
_Silence._
* * * * *
Lantry awoke. It had all been a dream, but God, how realistic. How
strangely the two men had carried on. But not unnaturally, oh, no. That
was exactly how you expected men of the future to talk. Men of the
future. Lantry grinned wryly. That was an anachronism for you. This
_was_ the future. This was happening _now_. It wasn't 300 years from
now, it was now, not then, or any other time. This wasn't the Twentieth
Century. Oh, how calmly those two men in the dream had said, "He got up
and walked away." "--interesting to think about." "_Isn't_ it, though?"
With never a quaver in their voices. With not so much as a glance over
their shoulders or a tremble of spade in hand. But, of course, with
their perfectly honest, logical minds, there was but one explanation;
certainly nobody had _stolen_ the corpse. "_Nobody_ steals." The corpse
had simply got up and walked off. The corpse was the only one who could
have _possibly_ moved the corpse. By the few casual slow words of the
gravediggers Lantry knew what they were thinking. Here was a man that
had lain in suspended animation, not really dead, for hundreds of
years. The jarring about, the activity, had brought him back.
Everyone had heard of those little green toads that are sealed for
centuries inside mud rocks or in ice patties, alive, alive oh! And how
when scientists chipped them out and warmed them like marbles in their
hands the little toads leapt about and frisked and blinked. Then it
was only logical that the gravediggers think of William Lantry in like
fashion.
But what if the various parts were fitted together in the next day or
so? If the vanished body and the shattered, exploded incinerator were
connected? What if this fellow named Burke, who had returned pale from
Mars, went to the library again and said to the young woman he wanted
some books and she said, "Oh, your friend Lantry was in the other day."
And he'd say, "Lantry who? Don't know anyone by that name." And she'd
say, "Oh, he _lied_." And people in this time didn't lie. So it would
all form and coalesce, item by item, bit by bit. A pale man who was
pale and shouldn't be pale had lied and people don't lie, and a walking
man on a lonely country road had walked and people don't walk anymore,
and a body was missing from a cemetery, and the Incinerator had blown
up and and and--
They would come after him. They would find him. He would be easy to
find. He walked. He lied. He was pale. They would find him and take him
and stick him through the open fire lock of the nearest Burner and that
would be your Mr. William Lantry, like a fourth of July set-piece!
[Illustration: _They would come after him. They would find him._]
There was only one thing to be done efficiently and completely. He
arose in violent moves. His lips were wide and his dark eyes were
flared and there was a trembling and burning all through him. He must
kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. He must make his enemies into
friends, into people like himself who walked but shouldn't walk, who
were pale in a land of pinks. He must kill and then kill and then kill
again. He must make bodies and dead people and corpses. He must destroy
Incinerator after Flue after Burner after Incinerator. Explosion on
explosion. Death on death. Then, when the Incinerators were all in
thrown ruin, and the hastily established morgues were jammed with the
bodies of people shattered by the explosion, then he would begin his
making of friends, his enrollment of the dead in his own cause.
Before they traced and found and killed him, they must be killed
themselves. So far he was safe. He could kill and they would not kill
back. People simply do not go around killing. That was his safety
margin. He climbed out of the abandoned drain, stood in the road.
He took the knife from his pocket and hailed the next beetle.
* * * * *
It was like the Fourth of July! The biggest damned firecracker of them
all. The Science Port Incinerator split down the middle and flew apart.
It made a thousand small explosions that ended with a greater one. It
fell upon the town and crushed houses and burned trees. It woke people
from sleep and then put them to sleep again, forever, an instant later.
William Lantry, sitting in a beetle that was not his own, tuned idly to
a station on the audio dial. The collapse of the Incinerator had killed
some four hundred people. Many had been caught in flattened houses,
others struck by flying metal. A temporary morgue was being set up at--
An address was given.
Lantry noted it with a pad and pencil.
He could go on this way, he thought, from town to town, from country to
country, destroying the Burners, the Pillars of Fire, until the whole
clean magnificent framework of flame and cauterization was tumbled. He
made a fair estimate--each explosion averaged five hundred dead. You
could work that up to a hundred thousand in no time.
He pressed the floor stud of the beetle. Smiling, he drove off through
the dark streets of the city.
* * * * *
The city coroner had requisitioned an old warehouse. From midnight
until four in the morning the grey beetles hissed down the rain-shiny
streets, turned in, and the bodies were laid out on the cold concrete
floors, with white sheets over them. It was a continuous flow until
about four-thirty, then it stopped. There were about two hundred bodies
there, white and cold.
The bodies were left alone; nobody stayed behind to tend them. There
was no use tending the dead; it was a useless procedure; the dead could
take care of themselves.
About five o'clock, with a touch of dawn in the east, the first trickle
of relatives arrived to identify their sons or their fathers or their
mothers or their uncles. The people moved quickly into the warehouse,
made the identification, moved quickly out again. By six o'clock, with
the sky still lighter in the east, this trickle had passed on, also.
William Lantry walked across the wide wet street and entered the
warehouse.
He held a piece of blue chalk in one hand.
He walked by the coroner who stood in the entranceway talking to two
others. "... drive the bodies to the Incinerator in Mellin Town,
tomorrow...." The voices faded.
Lantry moved, his feet echoing faintly on the cool concrete. A wave of
sourceless relief came to him as he walked among the shrouded figures.
He was among his own. And--better than that, by God! he had _created_
these! He had made them dead! He had procured for himself a vast number
of recumbent friends!
Was the coroner watching? Lantry turned his head. No. The warehouse
was calm and quiet and shadowed in the dark morning. The coroner was
walking away now, across the street, with his two attendants; a beetle
had drawn up on the other side of the street, and the coroner was going
over to talk with whoever was in the beetle.
William Lantry stood and made a blue chalk pentagram on the floor by
each of the bodies. He moved swiftly, swiftly, without a sound, without
blinking. In a few minutes, glancing up now and then to see if the
coroner was still busy, he had chalked the floor by a hundred bodies.
He straightened up and put the chalk in his pocket.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now
is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is
the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the
time....
Lying in the earth, over the centuries, the processes and thoughts
of passing peoples and passing times had seeped down to him, slowly,
as into a deep-buried sponge. From some death-memory in him now,
ironically, repeatedly, a black typewriter clacked out black even lines
of pertinent words:
Now is the time for all good men, for all good men, to come to the aid
of--
William Lantry.
_Other words_--