Friend to Man C M Kornbluth
Friend to Man C M Kornbluth
CALL HIM, if anything, Smith. He had answered to that and to other names in the past. Occupation, fugitive. His flight, it is true, had days before slowed to a walk and then to a crawl, but still he moved, a speck of gray, across the vast and featureless red plain of a planet not his own.
Nobody was following Smith, hte sometimes realized, and then he would rest for a while, but not long. After a minute or an hour the posse of his mind would reform and spur behind him; reason would cry no and still he would heave himself to his feet and begin again to inch across the sand.
The posse, imaginary and terrible, faded from front to rear. Perhaps in the very last rank of pursuers was a dim shadow of a schoolmate. Smith had never been one to fight fair. More solid were the images of his first commercial venture, the hijacking job. A truck driver with his chest burned out namelessly pursued; by his side a faceless cop. The ranks of the posse grew crowded then, for Smith had been a sort of organizer after that, but never an organizer too proud to demonstrate his skill. An immemorially old-fashioned garroting-wire trailed inches from the nape of Winkle’s neck, for Winkle had nearly sung to the police.
“Squealer!” shrieked Smith abruptly, startling himself. Shaking, he closed his eyes and still Winkle plodded after him, the tails of wire bobbing with every step, stiffly.
A solid, businesslike patrolman eclipsed him, drilled through the throat; beside him was the miraculously resurrected shade of Henderson.
The twelve-man crew of a pirated lighter marched, as you would expect, in military formation, but they bled ceaselessly from their ears and eyes as people do when shot into space without helmets.
These he could bear, but, somehow, Smith did not like to look at the leader of the posse. It was odd, but he did not like to look at her.
She had no business there! If they were ghosts why was she there? He hadn’t killed her, and, as far as he knew, Amy was alive and doing business in the Open Quarter at Portsmouth. It wasn’t fair, Smith wearily thought. He inched across the featureless plain and Amy followed with her eyes.
Let us! Let us! We have waited so long! Wait longer, little ones. Wait longer.
Smith, arriving at the planet, had gravitated to the Open Quarter and found, of course, that his reputation had preceded him. Little, sharp-faced men had sidled up to pay their respects, and they happened to know of a job waiting for the right touch-He brushed them off.
Smith found the virginal, gray-eyed Amy punching tapes for the Transport Company, tepidly engaged to a junior executive. The daughter of the Board Chairman, she fancied herself daring to work in the rough office at the port.
First was the child’s play of banishing her young man. A minor operation, it was managed with the smoothness and dispatch one learns after years of such things. Young Square-Jaw had been quite willing to be seduced by a talented young woman from the Open Quarter, and had been so comically astonished when the photographs appeared on the office bulletin board!
He had left by the next freighter, sweltering in a bunk by the tube butts, and the forlorn gray eyes were wet for him.
But how much longer must we^wait?
Much longer, little ones. It is weak—too weak.
The posse, Smith thought vaguely, was closing in. That meant, he supposed, that he was dying. It would not be too bad to be dead, quickly and cleanly. He had a horror of filth.
Really, he thought, this was too bad! The posse was in front of him—
It was not the posse; it was a spindly, complicated creature that, after a minute of bleary staring, he recognized as a native of the planet.
Smith thought and thought as he stared and could think of nothing to do about it. The problem was one of the few that he had never considered and debated within himself. If it had been a cop he would have acted; if it had been any human being he would have acted, but this-