A. E. Van Vogt - Asylum

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侵权投诉
natural. Carefully, he put his fingers to one eye, raised the lid,
peered into it. It stared back at him, a clouded, sightless blue.
He straightened, and stood very still there in the utter silence of
the hurtling ship. For a moment, then, in the intensity of his pos-
ture and in the dark ruthlessness of his lean, hard features, he
seemed the veritable embodiment of grim, icy calculation.
He thought grayly: “If I revived her now, she’d have more time to
attack me, and more strength. If I waited, she’d be weaker—”
Slowly, he relaxed. Some of the weariness of the years he and
this woman had spent together in the dark vastness of space came
to shatter his abnormal logic. Bleak sympathy touched him—and
the decision was made.
He prepared an injection, and fed it into her arm. His gray eyes
held a steely brightness as he put his lips near the woman’s ear; in
a ringing, resonant voice he said:
“We’re near a star system. There’ll be blood, Merla! And life!”
The woman stirred; momentarily, she seemed like a golden-
haired doll come alive. No color touched her perfectly formed
cheeks, but alertness crept into her eyes. She stared up at him with
a hardening hostility, half questioning.
“I’ve been chemical,” she said—and abruptly the doll-like effect
was gone. Her gaze tightened on him, and some of the prettiness
vanished from her face. Her lips twisted into words:
“It’s damned funny, Jeel, that you’re still 0. K. If I thought—”
He was cold, watchful. “Forget it,” he said curtly. “You’re an en-
ergy waster, and you know it. Anyway, we’re going to land.”
The flamelike tenseness of her faded. She sat up painfully, but
there was a thoughtful look on her face as she said:
“I’m interested in the risks. This is not a Galactic planet, is it?”
“There are no Galactics out here. But there is an Observer. I’ve
been catching the secret ultra signals for the last two hours”—a sar-
donic note entered his voice—”warning all ships to stay clear be-
on the opposite wall.
At first there was only a point of light in the middle of a starry
sky, then a planet floating brightly in the dark space, continents
and oceans plainly visible. A voice came out of the screen:
“This star system contains one inhabited planet, the third from
the Sun, called Earth by its inhabitants. It was colonized by Galac-
tics about seven thousand years ago in the usual manner. It is now
in the third degree of development, having attained a limited form of
space travel little more than a hundred years ago. It—”
With a swift movement, the man cut off the picture and turned
on the light, then looked across at the woman in a blank, trium-
phant silence.
“Third degree!” he said softly, and there was an almost incredu-
lous note in his voice. “Only third degree. Merla, do you realize what
this means? This is the opportunity of the ages. I’m going to call the
Dreegh tribe. If we can’t get away with several tankers of blood and
a whole battery of ‘life,’ we don’t deserve to be immortal. We—”
He turned toward the communicator, and for that exultant mo-
ment caution was a dim thing in the back of his mind. From the
corner of his eye, he saw the woman flow from the edge of the cot.
Too late he twisted aside. The frantic jerk saved him only partially;
it was their cheeks, not their lips that met.
Blue flame flashed from him to her. The burning energy seared
his cheek to instant, bleeding rawness. He half fell to the floor from
the shock; and then, furious with the intense agony, he fought free.
“I’ll break your bones!” he raged.
Her laughter, unlovely with her own suppressed fury, floated up
at him from the floor, where he had flung her. She snarled:
“So you did have a secret supply of ‘life’ for yourself. You damned
double-crosser!”
His black mortification dimmed before the stark realization that
anger was useless. Tense with the weakness that was already a
air that thickened with every receding mile.
It was the woman who helped his faltering form into the tiny life-
boat. He lay there, gathering strength, staring with tense eagerness
down at the blazing sea of lights that was the first city he had seen
on the night side of this strange world.
Dully, he watched as the woman carefully eased the small ship
into the darkness behind a shed in a little back alley; and, because
succor seemed suddenly near, sheer hope enabled him to walk be-
side her to the dimly lighted residential street nearby.
He would have walked on blankly into the street, but the
woman’s fingers held him back into the shadows of the alleyway.
“Are you mad?” she whispered. “Lie down. We’ll stay right here
till someone comes.”
The cement was hard beneath his body, but after a moment of
the painful rest it brought, he felt a faint surge of energy; and he
was able to voice his bitter thought:
“If you hadn’t stolen most of my carefully saved ‘life,’ we wouldn’t
be in this desperate position. You know well that it’s more impor-
tant that I remain at full power.”
In the dark beside him, the woman lay quiet for a while; then her
defiant whisper came:
“We both need a change of blood and a new charge of ‘life.’ Per-
haps I did take a little too much out of you, but that was because I
had to steal it. You wouldn’t have given it to me of your own free
will, and you know it.”
For a time, the futility of argument held him silent, but, as the
minutes dragged, that dreadful physical urgency once more tainted
his thoughts, he said heavily:
“You realize of course that we’ve revealed our presence. We
should have waited for the others to come. There’s no doubt at all
that our ship was spotted by the Galactic Observer in this system
before we reached the outer planets. They’ll have tracers on us
tention. And”—in spite of his appalling weakness, scorn came—”let
any of the kind of agents they have in these lower category planets
try to stop us.”
“Hush!” Her whisper was tense. “Footsteps! Quick, get to your
feet!”
He was aware of the shadowed form of her rising; then her hands
were tugging at him. Dizzily, he stood up.
“I don’t think,” he began wanly, “that I can—”
“Jeel!” Her whisper beat at him; her hands shook him. “It’s a
man and a woman. They’re ‘life,’ Jeel, ‘life’!”
Life!
He straightened with a terrible effort. A spark of the unquench-
able will to live that had brought him across the black miles and the
blacker years, burst into flames inside him. Lightly, swiftly, he fell
into step beside Merla, and strode beside her into the open. He saw
the shapes of the man and the woman.
In the half-night under the trees of that street, the couple came
toward them, drawing aside to let them pass; first the woman came,
then the man—and it was as simple as if all his strength had been
there in his muscles.
He saw Merla launch herself at the man; and then he was grabbing
the woman, his head bending instantly for that abnormal kiss— Af-
terward—after they had taken the blood, too—grimness came to the
man, a hard fabric of thought and counterthought, that slowly formed
into purpose; he said:
“We’ll leave the bodies here.”
Her startled whisper rose in objection, but he cut her short
harshly: “Let me handle this. These dead bodies will draw to this
city news gatherers, news reporters or whatever their breed are
called on this planet; and we need such a person now. Somewhere
in the reservoir of facts possessed by a person of this type must be
pp y y p y
He laughed gently, as her fingers gripped his arm in the dark-
ness, a convulsive gesture; her voice came: “Thank you, Jeel, you do
understand, don’t you?”
sleeping.
He caught himself making a mental note of that fact—and felt
abruptly shocked.
The first murders on the North American continent in twenty-
seven years. And it was only another job. By Heaven, he was
tougher than he’d ever believed.
He grew aware that the voices had stopped completely. The only
sound was the hoarse breathing of the man nearest him—and then
the scrape of his own shoes as he went forward.
His movement acted like a signal on that tense group of men.
There was a general pressing forward. Leigh had a moment of hard
anxiety; and then his bigger, harder muscles brought him where he
wanted to be, opposite the two heads.
He leaned forward in dark absorption. His fingers probed gin-
gerly the neck of the woman, where the incisions showed. He did
not look up at the attendant, as he said softly:
“This is where the blood was drained?”
“Yes.”
Before he could speak again, another reporter interjected: “Any
special comment from the police scientists? The murders are more
than a day old now. There ought to be something new.”
Leigh scarcely heard. The woman’s body, electrically warmed for
embalming, felt eerily lifelike to his touch. It was only after a long
moment that he noticed her lips were badly, almost brutally
bruised.
His gaze flicked to the man; and there were the same neck cuts,
the same torn lips. He looked up, questions quivered on his
tongue— and remained unspoken as realization came that the
calm-voiced attendant was still talking. The man was saying:
“—normally, when the electric embalmers are applied, there is
resistance from the static electricity of the body. Curiously, that
resistance was not present in either body.”
~rahd of mechanical psychology in all schools, thus ending murder,
theft, war and all unsocial perversions.”
The attendant in his black frock coat hesitated; then: “A very bad
one seems to have been missed.”
He finished: “That’s all, gentlemen. No clues, no promise of an
early capture, and only this final fact: We’ve wirelessed Professor
Ungarn and, by great good fortune, we caught him on his way to
Earth from his meteorite retreat near Jupiter. He’ll be landing
shortly after dark, in a few hours now.”
The lights dimmed. As Leigh stood frowning, watching the bodies
being wheeled out, a phrase floated out of the gathering chorus of
voices:
“—The kiss of death—”
“I tell you,” another voice said, “the captain of this space liner
swears it happened—the spaceship came past him at a million
miles an hour, and it was slowing down, get that, slowing down—
two days ago.”
“—The vampire case! That’s what I’m going to call it—”
That’s what Leigh called it, too, as he talked briefly into his wrist
communicator. He finished: “I’m going to supper now, Jim.”
“0. K., Bill.” The local editor’s voice came metallically. “And say,
I’m supposed to commend you. Nine thousand papers took the
Planetarian Service on this story, as compared with about forty-
seven hundred who bought from Universal, who got the second
largest coverage.
“And I think you’ve got the right angle for today also. Husband
and wife, ordinary young couple, taking an evening’s walk. Some
devil hauls up alongside them, drains their blood into a tank, their
life energy onto a wire or something—people will believe that, I
guess. Anyway, you suggest it could happen to anybody; so be care-
ful, folks. And you warn that, in these days of interplanetary
speeds, he could be anywhere tonight for his next murder.
persuasive talkers. Before I knew it, I was signed up for supper at
Constantine’s.”
“That’s right. I was supposed to remind you. 0. K.?”
Leigh shrugged. “I promised,” he said.
Actually, as he went out into the blaze of late afternoon, sunlit
street, there was not a thought in his head. Nor a premonition.
Around him, the swarm of humankind began to thicken. Vast
buildings discharged the first surge of the five o’clock tidal wave—
and twice Leigh felt the tug at his arm before it struck him that
someone was not just bumping him.
He turned, and stared down at a pair of dark, eager eyes set in a
brown, wizened face. The little man waved a sheaf of papers at him.
Leigh caught a glimpse of writing in longhand on the papers. Then
the fellow was babbling:
“Mr. Leigh, hundred dollars for these . . . biggest story—”
“Oh,” said Leigh. His interest collapsed; then his mind roused it-
self from its almost blank state; and pure politeness made him say:
“Take it up to the Planetarian office. Jim Brian will pay you what
the story is worth.”
He walked on, the vague conviction in his mind that the matter
was settled. Then, abruptly, there was the tugging at his arm again.
“Scoop!” the little man was muttering. “Professor Ungarn’s log,
all about a spaceship that came from the stars. Devils in it who
drink blood and kiss people to death!”
“See here!” Leigh began, irritated; and then he stopped physically
and mentally. A strange ugly chill swept through him. He stood
there, swaying a little from the shock of the thought that was frozen
in his brain:
The newspapers with those details of “blood” and “kiss” were not
on the street yet, wouldn’t be for another five minutes.
The man was saying: “Look, it’s got Professor Ungarn’s name
printed in gold on the top of each sheet, and it’s all about how he
Leigh did not even glance at them. His brain was crystal-clear, his
eyes cold; he snapped:
“I don’t know what game you’re trying to pull. I want to know
three things, and make your answers damned fast! One: How did
you pick me out, name and job and all, here in this packed street of
a city I haven’t been in for a year?”
He was vaguely aware of the little man trying to speak, stammer-
ing incomprehensible words. But he paid no attention. Remorse-
lessly, he pounded on:
“Two: Professor Ungarn is arriving from Jupiter in three hours.
How do you explain your possession of papers he must have writ-
ten, less than two days ago?”
“Look, boss,” the man chattered, “you’ve got me all wrong—”
“My third question,” Leigh said grimly, “is how are you going to
explain to the police your pre-knowledge of the details of—murder?”
“Huh!” The little man’s eyes were glassy, and for the first time
pity came to Leigh. He said almost softly:
“All right, fellah, start talking.”
The words came swiftly, and at first they were simply senseless
sounds; only gradually did coherence come.
“—And that’s the way it was, boss. I’m standing there, and this
kid comes up to me and points you out, and gives me five bucks
and those papers you’ve got, and tells me what I’m supposed to say
to you and—”
“Kid!” said Leigh; and the first shock was already in him.
“Yeah, kid about sixteen; no, more like eighteen or twenty . and
he gives me the papers and—”
“This kid,” said Leigh, “would you say he was of college age?”
“That’s it, boss; you’ve got it. That’s just what he was. You know
him, eh? 0. K., that leaves me in the clear, and I’ll be going—”
“Wait!” Leigh called, but the little man seemed suddenly to real-
ize that he need only run, for he jerked into a mad pace; and people
摘要：

natural.Carefully,heputhisfingerstooneeye,raisedthelid,peeredintoit.Itstaredbackathim,aclouded,sightlessblue.Hestraightened,andstoodverystillthereintheuttersilenceofthehurtlingship.Foramoment,then,intheintensityofhispos-tureandinthedarkruthlessnessofhislean,hardfeatures,heseemedtheveritableembodimen...

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