As if in answer to this, a rocket, flying low, trailing a long rakish feather of flame. It made Lantry flinch and draw back.
IV
It was but ten miles to the little town of Science Port. He made it by dawn, walking. But even this was not good. At four in the morning a silver beetle pulled up on the road beside him.
“Hello,” called the man inside.
“Hello,” said Lantry, wearily.
“Why are you walking?” asked the man.
“I’m going to Science Port.”
“Why don’t you ride?”
“I like to walk.”
“Nobody likes to walk. Are you sick? May I give you a ride?”
“Thanks, but I like to walk.”
The man hesitated, then closed the beetle door. “Good night.”
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 grave-digger, 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, 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 three hundred 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 any more, 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!
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.
